The GMB points out that the law applies to all new employees and that it explicitly forbids one group being singled out.In a letter to the Wakefield store, Steven Huckerby, GMB regional organiser, said management had created an atmosphere that made it acceptable to treat racial groups differently.Mr Huckerby said that one man of Asian origin with 10 years’ service had been asked to produce documents to prove he had the right to work in Britain.A spokesman for Asda said the company fully accepted that the managers in question had handled the situation poorly. One union source said: “This could be malice on the company’s part, or it could simply reflect the fact that pay is so low they don’t get the most intelligent managers.”The union says the message came after the introduction of legislation which dictates that all new employees must prove their right to work in the country. The workers, who were all Muslims, were ordered to produce evidence that they were not illegal immigrants. At least one was threatened with the sack unless he produced his passport the next day.
The highly public initiative by management, which came within weeks of the July 7 bombings in London, was followed by a spate of graffiti at the depot in Wakefield expressing hatred and contempt for Muslims and their religion.The GMB general union said there was evidence that management used the same tactics elsewhere. At one of the company’s main depots, a manager read out “foreign-sounding” names over the public address system ordering them to report immediately to the manager’s office.

The Home Office would not discuss the Sukulas’ case but confirmed Mr McNulty had received the petition.. The Asda supermarket group is being threatened with legal action for alleged racial discrimination after insisting that Muslim employees produce their passports to prove they had the right to work in Britain. Patricia Durr, parliamentary adviser to the Children’s Society and chair of the Refugee Children’s Consortium lobby group, said the legislation had affected “children’s school attendance, their ability to study and take exams and their friendships”.Ms Sukula’s supporters yesterday cited a recent BBC World Service report that said returned Congolese asylum-seekers had been imprisoned, tortured, raped and killed. More than four million people have died in the country’s civil war since the mid-1990s. He’s just not the same person anymore,” she said.The Association of Directors of Social Services has expressed “serious concerns” about the section nine legislation and the Local Government Association is uneasy about how councils should respond. There, she described the detrimental effect that the withdrawal of financial benefits had had on her seven-year-old brother, Destin, who had become distant at school. “They thought he was ill but now they think it’s stress and they’re saying he’s got special needs.

But the court here said one attack isn’t enough, despite the fact that we have been threatened with being killed because of my father’s political activity They didn’t even ask for evidence from my brothers and me. We know if we are forced back to the Congo our lives will be over.”The teenager’s path to the forefront of the campaign against deportation has already seen her address a parliamentary meeting at Westminster. My younger brothers and sisters are suffering with the uncertainty of it all All we want to do is to be allowed to study and work To be allowed to save our lives and be able to contribute We thought we’d be safe once we escaped My mother brought us here to save our lives. After her appeal to the Immigration minister Tony McNulty, Ms Sukula said yesterday: “I want to be a midwife but if we are sent back our lives will be over. The use of section nine began as a pilot 12 months ago in parts of London, west Yorkshire and Greater Manchester and has so far affected 116 families and 219 children.But the Sukulas are standing firm. Without benefits, the Government believes, they will have to return to their countries of origin. The teenager and her five siblings – aged 15, seven, four, two and nine months – provide a graphic illustration of the effects of one of the Government’s most controversial asylum policies: section nine of the 2004 Asylum and Immigration Act, under which asylum-seeking families whose claims to stay have been rejected can lose welfare allowances regardless of whether they have children.

Four years later, Ms Sukula wants to train as a midwife in the UK and her articulate public pleas against her family’s deportation have made her a figurehead for those seeking asylum in Britain. Yesterday she presented a petition of 2,500 names to the Home Office and urged the Immigration minister to reconsider the family’s case.
Ms Sukula, a 19-year-old A-level student from Bolton, Greater Manchester, has won over teachers, church leaders, youth leaders and celebrities including the town’s Olympic boxing star, Amir Khan, to her cause in the past few months. Few aspects of life in 1920s Britain depressed the novelist D H Lawrence more than the nation’s impoverished and tawdry outlook on matters of the flesh. Sex had been “reduced to lady’s underclothing and the fumbling therewith,” Lawrence wrote in his 1929 essay A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Men were excited by nothing more than “meaningless young women in expensive underclothes”.