Leading article: Avoidable tragedy

Friday 15 July 2011 00:00 BST
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Reports that the five men killed in the explosion at an industrial unit in Boston, Lincolnshire, were Polish migrants illegally distilling vodka have produced a flood of distasteful and racist comments. That is an entirely deplorable reaction.

What the criminality which lay behind this accident shows is the need to integrate migrant workers into our economic and social systems so that they pay tax and gain the full protection of the law. Most eastern European workers in the UK do jobs that their British counterparts disdain. It is only when they do so in the shadows of the grey economy that disasters like this happen.

The solution is not less immigration but less marginalisation.

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