The Windrush scandal
30/4/18 13:52![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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talkpoliticsMPs accuse home secretary of protecting PM over Windrush
"Amber Rudd ‘deeply regrets’ failure to spot scale of problem of a generation of Britons being wrongly targeted by immigration authorities."
A 61 year old lady who arrived in Britain when she was 10, and now, half a century later, learning that she is an illegal migrant, therefore she will be arrested and extradited. A 60 year olf man who arrived in Britain aged 8 from Jamaica, and a century later learning that he is facing expulsion...
These are just a couple of stories out of many that have surfaced in recent weeks. We are talking about people of Caribbean origin who had moved to Britain in the 50s and 60s, and who never applied for British citizenship. Their status is of illegal immigrants, has always been.
British Home Secretary Amber Rudd confirmed that there are already people who have been forced back to their countries of origin, which is a wrong thing to do. Many others have suddenly found out that even with terminal illnesses like cancer, they are denied medical services. Others have lost their jobs and homes.
This has deeply shocked the Caribbean community in the UK. On the other hand, these developments are hardly a surprise, given how obsessed with migration many of the British politicians are right now, and how short-sighted they are to fail to see the benefits that Britain enjoys from the contribution of its former colonies.
The Caribbean settlers who came to Britain between 1948 and 1971 are called the Windrush Generation, after the ship that brought the first migrants from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and other islands. In June 1948, Essex welcomed the first half a thousand settlers from the Caribbean, many of them children. They were basically invited to Britain to help the post-war recovery. Since they came from countries that were British colonies at the time, the question of their legal status was not an issue at that moment.
In the early 70s when the migration influx ceased, those who had come to the UK from the colonies were granted a status that allowed for the indefinite postponement of their repatriation to their home countries. But the Home Office did not bother to issue the necessary documents, so now those affected cannot prove their status of legal residents.
The problem now arises from the long-lasting British policy of tightening the measures against migration. In 2012 Theresa May, still Home Secretary at the time, took a course for making the life of illegal migrants harder by creating a "migrant-unfriendly environment". In practice that meant requiring of the migrants to present a residence permit whenever they applied for a job or a place to live, using medical services, etc.
Now this has become a problem of bureaucratic negligence that affects thousands of lives. The British government has long preferred to pretend the problem does not exist. When the Windrush scandal gained momentum, the Home Secretary was forced to apologise for the unprecedented pain the affected people had to endure. She said the approach of the authorities had been "wrong and despicable, which I deeply regret".
The British Home Office created a group of 20 experts who are presently working on the task of stopping the practice of treating the Windrush generation as illegal migrants. The British government has to solve the problem quickly, and totally change its approach from now on. And apologies will not be enough - real actions will be needed.
"Amber Rudd ‘deeply regrets’ failure to spot scale of problem of a generation of Britons being wrongly targeted by immigration authorities."
A 61 year old lady who arrived in Britain when she was 10, and now, half a century later, learning that she is an illegal migrant, therefore she will be arrested and extradited. A 60 year olf man who arrived in Britain aged 8 from Jamaica, and a century later learning that he is facing expulsion...
These are just a couple of stories out of many that have surfaced in recent weeks. We are talking about people of Caribbean origin who had moved to Britain in the 50s and 60s, and who never applied for British citizenship. Their status is of illegal immigrants, has always been.
British Home Secretary Amber Rudd confirmed that there are already people who have been forced back to their countries of origin, which is a wrong thing to do. Many others have suddenly found out that even with terminal illnesses like cancer, they are denied medical services. Others have lost their jobs and homes.
This has deeply shocked the Caribbean community in the UK. On the other hand, these developments are hardly a surprise, given how obsessed with migration many of the British politicians are right now, and how short-sighted they are to fail to see the benefits that Britain enjoys from the contribution of its former colonies.
The Caribbean settlers who came to Britain between 1948 and 1971 are called the Windrush Generation, after the ship that brought the first migrants from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and other islands. In June 1948, Essex welcomed the first half a thousand settlers from the Caribbean, many of them children. They were basically invited to Britain to help the post-war recovery. Since they came from countries that were British colonies at the time, the question of their legal status was not an issue at that moment.
In the early 70s when the migration influx ceased, those who had come to the UK from the colonies were granted a status that allowed for the indefinite postponement of their repatriation to their home countries. But the Home Office did not bother to issue the necessary documents, so now those affected cannot prove their status of legal residents.
The problem now arises from the long-lasting British policy of tightening the measures against migration. In 2012 Theresa May, still Home Secretary at the time, took a course for making the life of illegal migrants harder by creating a "migrant-unfriendly environment". In practice that meant requiring of the migrants to present a residence permit whenever they applied for a job or a place to live, using medical services, etc.
Now this has become a problem of bureaucratic negligence that affects thousands of lives. The British government has long preferred to pretend the problem does not exist. When the Windrush scandal gained momentum, the Home Secretary was forced to apologise for the unprecedented pain the affected people had to endure. She said the approach of the authorities had been "wrong and despicable, which I deeply regret".
The British Home Office created a group of 20 experts who are presently working on the task of stopping the practice of treating the Windrush generation as illegal migrants. The British government has to solve the problem quickly, and totally change its approach from now on. And apologies will not be enough - real actions will be needed.
(no subject)
Date: 30/4/18 12:25 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 30/4/18 13:19 (UTC)They were brought in to appease the fascist-inclined right-wing of the Tory party by the coalition.
They were brought in ignoring the advice in debate from opposition politicians in the Commons, cross-benchers in the Lords, and also advice from some senior civil servants; but with the support of a few newspapers, media organisations, some of the more lunatic fringe in the Home Office, and political groupings within the Tories themselves. This policy was implemented by Theresa May to appease that monstrous coalition, despite being against her inclinations or natural political stance. (Ah - political necessity makes strange bedfellows of folk.)
Theresa May is the person who should have to answer for this policy.
The press has been inviting the PM to throw Rudd under a bus for almost a fortnight. The two left of centre papers as part of any attack on the stupidities of the present government; the majority of the papers being right of centre (sometimes extremely so), they have attacked Rudd because of her apparent moderate stance and the fact she is a remainer. But the fault is the policy, which many of the folk throwing Ms Rudd under the bus have encouraged and promoted.
The UK is pretty well fucked, politically speaking.
Our two major parties are run by either someone who has enacted fascist policies or someone who would rather believe the Russian intelligence services over their own, the Five Eyes network, the US's, the French, or the German's. That is as compromised a set of political parties as any former Eastern European state can manage - worse, it makes the despotism and incompetence of many "banana republics" look positively benign in comparison.
On my own blog I posted this some 4 days ago which kicks off with a story about a British High Commissioner - Arthur Snell:
https://johnny9fingers.dreamwidth.org/286330.html
I'll quote from it:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/25/arthur-snell-high-commissioner-baby-denied-uk-passport-2011
It has to be said that the Home Office is a place where folk who like telling people to fuck off congregate; and I suppose if they can do that to a High Commissioner in the F.O. then the poor blighters without Mr Snell's connections or status will get told to fuck off quite a lot more. With manacles if the Home Office can get away with it. And detention centres. Maybe a little barbed wire spread around, just for the look of it. Armed machine gun posts? I've never been a good interior designer, and I suppose
concentration campsdetention centres partake of unusual accoutrements. What counts as proper fascist bling in these circumstances, I wonder: uniforms designed by Hugo Boss? motorcycles with sidecars and armed outriders? maybe an armoured car or two?What about the numbers deported? The peoples lives made misery? The jobs lost, the families sundered, the alienation of folk forced to move from their homes and friends and support network, and the country which they have always known as home?
Let's call a fascist a fascist, shall we? We allow our fascists in the Home Office and Police Force and Prison Service because for some reason or other they have a zeal for telling folk to fuck off, or do this, or do that. And then, instead of controlling those nasty tendencies with sensible discipline and oversight in order to keep the Home Office honest, we have allowed them to run riot; aided and abetted by the usual suspects from the top down. It is not strange that historically right-wing newspapers are still right-wing, though their influence is diminishing exponentially in the face of new media. What is both strange, and appalling, is that even when she was Home Secretary, Mrs May should have had a "Sir Humphrey" to steer her away from such evil stupidness, and either she didn't, or she ignored him or her. None of us are Nostradamus (and even he wasn't, so to speak) but it doesn't take a lot of foresight to realise that such policies will come back to bite you somewhere you don't want to be bitten.
The way I see it is fascists, like the poor, are always with us and need to be integrated into society too. The trick is to use their talents within a highly disciplined framework, and with lots of oversight to keep them in check - hence the Home Office; and which is also why a reasonably liberal Home Secretary is almost always a good thing.
(no subject)
Date: 1/5/18 08:33 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 1/5/18 09:23 (UTC)Folk from the Caribbean have integrated quite well into society. However, the "culture" of the Home Office is such that a lot of folk who even in this enlightened age have let us say certain irrational prejudices against any immigrants, not just the slightly jihadist variety, tend to find the department to their taste. Just like folk who haven't a natural disinclination for locking people up tend to be attracted to careers as prison officers.
The extreme end of the Tory Party has always had links with the far right, just as the extreme end of the Labour Party has/had links with revolutionary socialist groups. There used to be an umbrella right-wing organisation called the League of St George which co-ordinated meetings between the right of the Tory Party and groups like WISE (Welsh, Irish, Scottish, English) which facilitated meetings between the Tory Party loonies and your actual British neo-Nazis. The problem was complicated by the fact that many of the extreme neo-Nazi groups had been set-up by our intel services as resistance cells for after a potential catastrophic loss in a war with the Eastern Block. So a lot of Tories with Intel contacts were actively encouraged to participate for the sake of monitoring.
The history of the establishment's use of the far right is pretty fucked up, actually. It is really difficult to convey context here.
The left were just as bad in the '70's.
(no subject)
Date: 1/5/18 09:44 (UTC)Just like the Brexit referendum, the "Windrush Policy" of making things difficult for legal immigrants was meant to appease the significant minority of racist remnants in the country, most of whom had been stoked up by many years of newspapers spinning immigration in much the same way as they spun the EU. And like the EU debate....
We are in danger of sleepwalking into a fascist state. And this isn't just the UK, the US, or Poland or Hungary. France and Austria are vulnerable, as are many other developed nations.
(no subject)
Date: 30/4/18 18:09 (UTC)Why has no journalist actually asked why in that case were the Home Office targeting folk here legally? Can't they differentiate? They are, after all, the ones who threw away a lot of the paperwork of these legitimate immigrants. Could it be they were targeted for other reasons? Easy ways to make up numbers?
This appears to be the way we are all going. Not really very inspiring, is it?
Oh Mrs May, when you pander to fascists, you become a fascist appeaser.
So despite the security issues I suppose I'll still vote for Corbyn. It's a fucking nightmare.
(no subject)
Date: 1/5/18 08:35 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 1/5/18 09:27 (UTC)And actually, no-one objects to an Eastern European until they start to speak, whereas black folk can be disliked on sight. For the minority who want to dislike otherness, I think there is a sliding scale.
(no subject)
Date: 1/5/18 09:33 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 1/5/18 09:47 (UTC)The UK is by no means uniform in it's opinions, and there is still a significant racist rump. Weirdly this racist element has been growing considerably since the advent of social media, and as we have adopted more and more American attitudes.
I despair, but what does that matter.
(no subject)
Date: 1/5/18 10:25 (UTC)Or is that too cynical an analysis?
(no subject)
Date: 30/4/18 18:12 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 30/4/18 22:16 (UTC)I don't especially like Sajid Javid's worship of Ayn Rand, but it's hard not to admire someone who can get to be Home Secretary from such background during a period when it appears the UK has been quite as racist as anywhere else in the world. (We don't actually see ourselves as racist, obvs; and probably don't like it when it is pointed out to us because it goes against our opinion of ourselves, if that's not too solipsistic a point.)
It's a canny move from Madame May. If she had only a chap/chapess with Caribbean heritage who was qualified it might have been an even better move. I guess Kwasi Kwateng was too African, too much a Brexiteer, and obviously too Etonian for the job; but that's the level of cynicism which I habitually employ when looking at any of these sort of appointments from either party. Javid was a good choice, inasmuch as he had a state education, his dad was a bus driver, he is from immigrant stock, and he is obviously an embodiment of the Whiggish ideal of the self-made person. I admire that, despite being a very old form of High Tory who dislikes many of the Whiggish notions at present being recycled. (Mind you Ayn Rand is worse by far.) I dislike the guy's politics, but well done to the man. He now has to sort the problem out, and try to persuade Mrs May not to click her heels together when she stops walking.
I had always thought that the "Windrush Policy" was foisted upon May by the requirements of balancing the looney end of the Tory right, and to stop them frothing at the mouth and frightening the horses. I wonder though if her time in the Home Office has changed her. It is so easy to go native when you're being advised by folk in the department you supposedly run.
I think it's time for a root-and-branch review of the Home Office, it's culture, and it's competence.
(no subject)
Date: 1/5/18 08:35 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 1/5/18 10:09 (UTC)One could almost admire Mrs May if it hadn't been her policies which kicked the whole thing off in the first place.
How the government makes redress is now the issue: compensation - a weregild if you like.
This has been more madness just when we need a dose of sanity. I suppose the next thing we can expect in this insane timeline is for some soap-box ranter to start channelling Thanos. I'm so tempted to quote Kenneth Wolstenholme right now.
(no subject)
Date: 3/5/18 15:55 (UTC)https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/03/home-office-official-tells-man-facing-deportation-my-job-is-to-piss-you-off
See what I mean?