Well, it’s crunch time for Amber Rudd tomorrow in the Commons. The dripfeed of revelation over the weekend has not been helpful, whether it was the former immigration minister revealing that the Tories spent millions trying to get a ten percent increase in “removals” (how disgustingly Orwellian, making it sound like a change of house), their term for enforced deportation.
However uncomfortable it might make the government, this crisis has not worn well on the Home Secretary, and there’s no reason it should. Her real crime in all of this is not living up to her liberal tagline, gleefully going about extending Theresa May’s agenda, then pretending that she knew fuck all about any of it.
The Tories’ latest ploy is to try and break the issue into two separate issues, Windrush, which they’re really sorry for, and the pursuit of illegal immigrants, which they’re really not sorry about. It’s a complete nonsense; the two are completely related especially when you spot the glue of typical Tory simplification and underfunding, leaving Home Office reports to damningly use terms like “low hanging fruit”.
The Windrush generation were that low hanging fruit, their rights brought low when the Tory government of 2010 destroyed any record of whether they were British citizens in the first place, shaken from the lofty canopy of being a full British citizen to someone fighting for survival, someone that cannot get NHS treatment, or return home after a holiday to Jamaica or St. Lucia.
It’s a fucking disgrace, and the only question in my mind is which party has disgraced themselves the most.
The government, for implementing the policy and attempting to explain it in this way; Michael Gove’s notion that this is just a Labour plot to deflect attention from antisemitism allegations is perhaps the most laughable, especially as the Conservatives are politically aligned with parties that openly express antisemitic views in the European Parliament.
Or the media, for not knocking the obvious underarm bowl, and this government, out for six.