Britain
prides itself on being a liberal state, tolerant of diverse points of
view with a judicial system based on law and evidence, but its recent
behavior has been anything but that.
by
Alexander Mercouris
Part
4 - The Windrush Scandal
The
third scandal—actually two scandals which have evolved together—is
however the most revealing and interesting of the lot.
Over the
last few weeks both the Conservative and the Labour parties have been
targets of accusations of racism.
In the
case of the Tories the allegations stem from what is called the
Windrush affair.
As is
true in most Western countries today, Britain has witnessed over the
last decade a strong swing in public hostility against immigration.
Much of the opposition to the European Union in Britain is driven by
the British public’s belief that it is the EU that has made the
increase in immigration to Britain—which has undoubtedly taken
place over the previous two decades—possible.
The
Conservative Party, since it came to power in 2010, has sought to
respond to this sentiment—much of which has clearly racist
undertones—by taking a strong anti-immigration position. The point
figure is British Prime Minister Theresa May, who as home secretary
(the minister responsible for control of borders and the police)
introduced and implemented what is semi-officially called a “hostile
environment policy” towards immigrants who have not managed to sort
out their status.
The idea
is to put as many administrative and other obstacles in the path of
these people as possible to make their lives in Britain intolerable
in order to force them to leave without having to take what might be
legally challengeable action to deport them.
That
this is a profoundly illiberal and even racist policy discriminating
against people of non-British ethnicity should be obvious. It has
however proved to be popular with a large section of the British
electorate.
The
electoral success this policy is believed to have brought the
Conservatives was one factor in establishing May’s reputation in
Tory eyes as a successful home secretary, and was one of the reasons
why she succeeded David Cameron as prime minister after the Brexit
vote in 2016 forced him to step down.
The
policy of the “hostile environment policy” has, however, had the
consequence of making victims out of some members of the so-called
“Windrush generation” of immigrants, whose legal right to be in
Britain is indisputable.
These
are people from the former British empire and Commonwealth who were
formally given the right to settle in Britain by the British National
Act of 1948, and who take their name from a ship—the HMT Empire
Windrush—which brought the first group of such immigrants to
Britain in 1948 from the British colonies in the Caribbean.
In April
2018 it turned out that many of the records relating to these people
had been “accidentally destroyed,” making it difficult for them
or their children to prove their legal right to be in Britain.
The
result was that they got caught up in May’s “hostile environment
policy” with pressure placed on them to leave Britain
(“self-deport,” as it is called) with threats that they might be
deported if they did not.
When the
scandal broke—in large part because the opposition Labour Party
made an issue of it after it was leaked from a Home Office source to
the media—a public apology was forced from the British government,
and Amber Rudd—May’s successor as home secretary – was forced
to resign. However, the prime minister, the actual author of the
“hostile environment policy” which was the cause of the scandal,
has emerged unscathed.
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