UKC

Such an important  if depressing article I thought this deserved its own thread. Apologies if its linked elsewehere already in the huge home office thread.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/20/its-inhumane-the-windrush-v...

Really horrible to think this has been happening in recent years in my own country.

Thanks, it's absolutely disgraceful and I think a public enquiry is needed to understand how much damage has been done to the lives of innocent people and what amends need to be made.

Time for two resignations as well I think. The Home secretary who devised this policy in the first place and the Home secretary who's been implementing it.

As disturbing and upsetting as the Windrush situation is I don't think that this is a good time for the Prime Minister (if it's her that you are referring to) to resign.

I'm not really sure that it's a resigning matter.

Yikes! Up until I read this, I'd stupidly assumed this was a media inflated story about a mix-up affecting one or two people only. Pretty sad that it's obviously been very systemic. Even IF this these people were "illegal" this would be appalling treatment. Shocking how quickly common sense can get lost.

A compensation matter, might help set some of the wrongs right.

But it was her and her previous department, before she was PM that instigated a lot of this trouble in the first place.

I understand it's a bit different from the usual reasons that tories resign like giving a dose of STD to a 14 year old rent boy and that sort of stuff but the formulation and implementation of a deliberately vindictive policy is something that makes me feel ashamed of my country. How dare she treat people like this!

Ask yourself if this is how you want Britain to behave. 

...and anyway, no one really wants her as Prime minister, least of all the tories. She'd be no great loss to the nation.

Compensation should be awarded to anyone directly  affected by this situation.

If it is decided that people should resign then so be it but now is not a good time for a change of Prime Minister - (she can resign post Brexit) - although Boris might disagree.

Is this really a vindictive policy?

Possibly towards illegal immigrants and I have no problem with that.

What's happened to the legal migrants is many things but I'm not sure that it was deliberate and therefore not vindictive.

It was in that in order to prove they were British citizens they had to be able to produce very specific documents, some of which the Government had had in their possession but had destroyed! When they obviously couldn't produce those documents they had to prove their residence in the UK in other ways that bordered upon the impossible. They could not, for example, ask the government to check up whether they had paid tax all their working lives, check what schools they had gone to or used a myriad of other ways to prove beyond reasonable doubt that they were who they said they were.

Actually, I find the idea of someone who came up with the Himmler like sentiment "Deport first, hear appeals later" running the country utterly horrendous - these words passed me by when she said them but now they put everything in place.  She isn't fit to run the country or railroad us out of the EU.  Bad jusgement, bad motivation.

I don't dispute the facts of the case.

What is debatable is whether or not this was a deliberate and vindictive attack.

On 'This Week' last night Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary when the landing card fiasco began and maybe the creator of the 'hostile environment 'was keen to point out that in the quest for the said hostile environment the Windrush Generation and similar migrant groups were definitely not the intended targets.

Maybe the key word is intended.

That a government can act in a callous and uncaring way will not come as news to many who have had to deal with a wide variety of government departments and officials.

The idea of deporting first is to put the victims so far out of reach of justice that there wouldn't be many appeals to hear.   I suppose that follows in the great tradition of British Justice pre 1882.  similar idea to putting the courts out of financial reach of those needing them.  Removal of rights by making their exercise inaccessible.

As far as I am aware the 'deport first .......' quote is from the 2013 Conservative Party conference and is a misquote in that only part of her sentence has been quoted.

A bit like Mrs Thatcher's 'no such thing as society' statement.

I could post Mrs May's actual sentence which puts a slightly different gloss on things but I'll let you enjoy the delights of googling it.

Why thank you, sir! That’s really helpful. Thinks: now what was that definition of a ‘twxt’ I’ve been looking for?

I can't be bothered typing something that somebody couldn't be arsed to google.

If that makes me a t..t then I'm your huckleberry.

And while I'm at it would you kindly not use parts of the female anatomy as an insult, I find it offensive.

Cases like these have been rife since the immigration bill in 2014, charities, human rights lawyers etc etc had raised the alarm as loud as they could, but as usual in this country, if the right wing press is not interested, nothing happens.

It was absolutely deliberate. They knew exactly what they were doing, they had been warned aNd MPs receive cases like that in their mailbox evert day so it wasn't a secret to anyone what was happening.

The objective was to simply reduce net migration by any means, even if that meant pushing out and persecuting people on technicalities.

I note that despite the media outcry, nothing is changing, except that the windrush will temporarily get special treatment at the discretion of the home office.

So you are claiming that in order to get the migration numbers down a group of politicians sat down and worked out how to deport certain groups of people, including the windrush people?

If they did then it's a deliberate act.

They did, and I'm not even sure why it's even questionable that they didn't, they knew exactly what they were doing and what the consequences would be, not only it's bleeding obvious, but they were repeatedly told.

The legal term is "reckless as to the consequences" , which is generally held to be as culpable as intent where the consequences are reasonably forseeable.   Those enacting legislation have a duty to forsee likely consequences.

You'll be basing these deliberate acts on what evidence?

Minutes of meetings, testimony from people who were actually at these meetings, etc?

Or have you just looked at the consequences and decided that it must have been deliberate?

If you have actual proof that the government deliberately targeted the Windrush Generation for deportation then I'm sure that the press will be very interested.

I think you're making it up and confusing a not very sensible or sensitive policy with a deliberately vindictive one.

I don't think it really matters that it's deliberate.

I see it this way. I design things for a living. Sometimes I design things that are potentially harmful. I have to take great care to make sure that whatever I design doesn't do any harm to anyone. If I was careless and the result of that carelessness was someone being injured then I would be at fault. In fact I'd be prosecuted along with my company. I would be prosecuted not because I deliberately intended to harm anyone but because I was careless.

Look at the legislation and the broader implementation of government immigration policy. It was poorly thought out, carelessly implemented and when the government were alerted to the problems their policy was causing they did nothing to rectify things. It was only when it became front page news that they finally did something. If it hadn't been front page news people would still be being evicted from their homes, refused medical treatment or refused re entry into the country they have lived in for most of their lives.

That is the scandal. Uncaring ineptitude.

That is inexcusable.

I'm not trying to defend the way that the government has gone about enacting its immigration policy.

The recently pubilcised events are just the latest fiasco in what has been a shambles for decades.

What I will not accept at this present time is that any government deliberately set out to deport legal immigrants who in some cases have been here for over 50 years in order to reduce the migration figures. (Which would in itself be a useless policy as long as hundreds of thousands of new migrants arrive each year).

Should new evidence arise (where are you Rom?) then I might/will change my mind.

Uncaring ineptitude could be the motto for many government policies and their implementation.

Thankyou, you get a like for that !

On the bleeding obvious. Orqybe you think the ministers are completely stupid and didn't know what would the obvious consequences if their policy.

Even if you try to make us believe the ministers were stupid and didn't know what they were doing, this argument doesn't hold for one minute, and migrant s rights groups,  lawyers, MPs, had been warning them from the stary.

They were not targeted. I have not said they were targeted, on the contrary, they are not the only victims. The windrush cases have been carved out by the media, but they are the rule - not the exception. 

People of all backgrounds are impacted.

It is comvenient to make this to look as if it was an injustice made to one group, when in fact it is simply the strict application of the law, and impacted people of all sort of backgrounds - not only windrush.

At the end of the say the Windrush cases will get special treatment over everybody else, task force, fasttrack, compensation etc etc but everybody else in the immigration system facing g the same issue will get nothing.

It's was deliberatly vindictive, by design, it was the whole point : to reduce net migration by all means, even if it meant ruining people's lives.

Listening to the radio yesterday, two girls, I think from Nigeria.

Were brought here by their parents, went to junior and secondary school throughout their lives, but now can't go to university because they're not citizens, they have no intention of living anywhere else, but would have to pay £21K per year fees as foreign students!!

Their options, a ten year citizenship application which they must renews every 2-3 years( I think) at a cost of £2.5K a go.

One of the families, had to chose between two children to apply because she could only afford to do it for one of them!!

How stupid and short sighted is this?

Once again it boils down to money, not how useful you'll be in society, but whether your parent can afford to cough up for you.

Makes my blood boil!!

Just cruel.

Now that Amber Rudd has been caught lying about deportation quotas I imagine her days as a minister are numbered. Once she goes Theresa will have lost her human shield, no more hiding behind civil servants or ministers, she'll be answering the questions herself.

"...where there is no risk of serious and irreversible harm, we can deport first and hear appeals later".

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/987296946774859782

To be honest, it's not remotely clear to me what that is supposed to actually mean. "no risk of serious and irreversible harm" sound like weasel words along the same lines as "I'm not racist, but...". The sentiment is still that the emphasis is on deportation, not on checking whether it is the correct thing to do.

It's fairly clear that the Home Office has not exercised much care, leniency or humanity in any of this. Ignore the Windrush saga and there are dozens of examples of institutional incompetence/cruelty:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/19/home-office-u-turn-on-durha...

It seems you need to get a public outcry, a petition with 1000s of signatures, a mention from an MP in the commons and a Guardian article before the HO will review your case.

Rudd earlier was happy to blame every home secretary apart from her direct predecessor, who set the policy direction that led to this. Theresa May is directly responsible and should resign. She's a disgrace and a deeply nasty woman.

From some points of view...

Prime Ministers don't usually resign for anything to do with competence, or even scandal, although they often resign for reasons of ill-health shortly after (e.g. MacMillan after the Profumo affair, or Eden after Suez. I can't think of any, at least since the Second World War. So I expect that at Prime-Ministerial level you're right. Amber Rudd is in a different position, and arguably has lied and misled the House, both resigning issues under the ministerial code. How serious is her lying and misleading? That's a difficult judgement, certainly on the latter count because ministers often seem to be misleading the House in various more or less trivial ways.

It is not the result of institutional incompetence. It is, in fact, the result of institutional over-competence, They did exactly what the ministers, and in fact, the parliament, and more widely, the opinion, asked them to do. Along with impossible targets to meet, the Home Office has been given wide executive powers, they can detain, deport, harass and persecute pretty much anybody they want with little to no consequences. In many cases, the applicant doesn't even have the right to appeal to the courts (yes, in a country that supposedly has the rule of law) and when they do, the process is so long, expensive, and frustrating that people just give up and leave because they simply cannot sustain themselves in the hostile environment.  

Abbot thinks Rudd should resign for not getting her facts right. Pure comedy script writing. 

Baron, you know you really need to give up on this one." I Daniel Blake" showed how a culture of obstruction and inhumanity had been, and continues to be, implemented and sustained by the government ;where "healthcare professionals" "assess" people with disabilities then deny them their benefits. Windrush is exactly the same and the home office will be frantically working to use the case as a smokescreen for all the other injustices that are systemic to border control. All to satisfy the Tories' racist right wing constituency.

It's not a few unfortunate fallings through the net it's a bluidy discrace. Brilliant Polly Toynbee piece in the Guardian says it far better than me. 

Are you sure it wasn't for telling porkies, a bit like Boris.

Really? A one-off cock up over some numbers in a radio interview, vs a complete ignorance towards the cruelty and casually racist incompetence of the government department you're supposed to be running. They're hardly equivalent.

An mp doesn't physically sit in every migration office. This cluster belongs to senior civil servants and many mps from both parties over the past decade. Who should on occasion leave their two party squabbling behind and between elections focus on getting on with their job of fixing problems, instead of just complaining about problems or seeing if they can blame someone else for it.

Your messiah isn't perfect either when he's on a east coast train. 

Bit different telling lies than not getting facts right though isn't it?

Funny how it's the leaders fault when it's Labour, but nothing to do with them when it's Tories, eh?

TM was the instigator of let's make it tough when she was in charge, and it's evolved into what we have now and no one who's been in charge has spotted it. This isn't something that happened overnight.

Of course when the law was changed in 2014 a few Labour MPs voted against the changes among them Corbyn and Abbott. Abbott made a speech outlining the probable outcome of the changes, which sadly have come to fruition. If only they'd listened then

Where did i say a Labour PM lied about windrush? I

I thought it was approved in 2009, actioned in 2010?

Corbyn has made a bit of habit voting against things..  so would not base his no vote on anything.

Exactly. Claiming he couldn't get a seat was a flat out lie, he knew he could get a seat when he made his little movie. 

I'll give you facts wrong with Abbott. Apart from being incredibly bad a preparing information and research, her basic primary school level maths is dreadful. 

A good interview with David Blunkett on R4 this morning.

Basically pointing out that targets are nothing new and that it is not really a resigning matter.

Also that if Rudd resigns it leave the cabinet short of a remainer and creates an imbalance. For the sake of the remain cause he was a firm advocate of her staying.

An interesting "strategic remain" viewpoint from a former Home Secretary

It's ironic (possibly deliberately so) that The Guardian prints frequent pictures of May attending church every Sunday, and indeed she is a C of E vicar's daughter. I don't think Christianity informs her policies  very much, do you?

Except maybe his principles and conscience, but other than that you might be right.

Not really.  Its to satisfy the general national clamour for more control on immigration.  The government already has its hard core support in its pocket. 

How come that I've known about all this for six months now (a regular Guardian reader, as you might guess) whereas to the minister responsible it all came as a horrible shock a few days ago. https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/off_belay/this_makes_me_ashamed-675426#x8...                  It's hardly surprising that the political class in general is the least trusted group in the country.

Incidentally, it makes you realise how important to the decency of our political life is the existence of investigative journalism such as that of Amelia Gentleman of the Guardian who has spent much of the last year gnawing away at this particular bone like an especially persistent Jack Russell terrier. I hope all the people wringing their hands on this issue are supporting The Guardian with regular donations. They are asking for £5 a month, in case you're interested. Go to the Guardian website to sign up. Oh, and £5 a month isn't the maximum donation allowed. The Guardian only exists because of a Trust, and there is no owner. This is in stark contrast to papers like the Sun, Mail, Telegraph, Times etc etc., none of which would have pursued this issue in the way The Guardian has, or indeed at all. Not saying any of these owners are racist xenophobes, or anything like that....

But these specific policies are directly attributable to Rudd's direct predecessor in the HO. Yet Rudd was somehow able to blame every past Labour HS for this outrage, except for the one directly responsible for it, then had the gall to claim she's the best person to fix the sorry mess.

The destruction of the landing cards is a complete red herring in this issue.

The clamour is orchestrated by the nasty right wing of the Tory party and the nasty populist right wing press. 

There is a lot of nastiness in many previously tolerant countries at present but I contest that it is whipped up. 

Since when did the 'working class' listen to a bunch of tories or far right groups? the clamour is stirred up because people feel threatened by immigration and no one feels more threatened than someone in a relatively low skilled area like building or plumbing.

It just seems such a curious blind spot for people not to see that immigration is an issue that spans the political spectrum and the class spectrum. 

Which people? Not everyone, and not all working class people either. There may be resentments at local level - some areas being more affected by immigration than others -  but nationally it's as much stirred up because opportunists in the press and political sphere see ways to take advantage. 

Plumbing might have been a relatively low-skilled area at one time, but I don't think that's the case any more. 

Of course it's an issue. But not necessarily one that's seen as a problem.

I've no doubt the press stir things up, but communities are quite capable of great insularity without the help of the press.  Its always been thus. 

I was really hoping the country was better than this.

Sorry for the delay in replying, been offline.

The idea of deporting first was related to convicted criminals but this was usually missing when Mrs May was quoted.

This doesn't, of course, excuse the home office cock ups.

I'm not sure what I should be giving up on?

I have already denounced the treatment of the Windrush people at the start of this thread but if something is misquoted then surely it should be pointed out.

I probably fit the description of right wing Tory and I want to see immigration controlled but that's immigration not the deportation of people already living here legally.

Sorry for the delay in replying.

The 'Windrush Generation were here legally, the problem is poor administration over the last 40 years has resulted in a small number of regrettable and in many ways offensive outcomes.

Immigration was left unchecked and uncontrolled for too many years under Labour and Conservative governments.

The tub thumping tribal response to this subject is unhelpful in almost every way.

We, as does every other state, should control immigration, if you think that this is simple then you're in a v. small minority.

PS If Amber Rudd has misled the House then she must resign.

Give up trying to mitigate the bad impression caused by the government's indefensible position with regard to Windrush. Oh and give up being a right wing Tory seeing as you mentioned it  

The persecution of British citizens has nothing to do with Labour. Theresa May, Amber Rudd and a host of other nasty tories own it. I don't think all tories are nasty by the way.

I may be a Labour voter by I am incensed by the behaviour of our government simply because it outrages my sense of human decency. I am dismayed that you or anyone else would be an apologist for the behaviour of these politicians and the department they ran and I am insulted by your implication that my outrage is in some way motivated by a desire to damage the tory party.  As I mentioned at the start of the thread, some people close to me have been through this hostile environment and as a result I take this personally. 

Now to say what I intended to.

1.3.c of the Ministerial code:

"It is of paramount importance that Ministers give accurate and truthful information to Parliament, correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity. Ministers who knowingly mislead Parliament will be expected to offer their resignation to the Prime Minister."

A keystone of democracy  is that we can take it that Ministers do not tell direct lies. There needs to be a level of trust between them, Parliament and the public. 

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/apr/27/amber-rudd-was-told-about-...

She has to go.

I can't and won't try to defend the government mishandling of either the Windrush situation or immigration in general and we need right wingers (I used to be UKIP but defected) to keep you communists in check.  

Good grief. How many copied in memos does a minister get a day.? Based on that alone she should resign.? Come on, get real . 

I barely remember the detail of all the memos that cross my path. 

Since they've been reading the Daily Mail. For decades. FFS, who do you think voted for Thatcher? It wasn't just city gents.

Yes, if only those ignorant plebs had the ability to think for themselves and not swallow the Tory propaganda we'd be living in a socialist paradise. 

Most of the BNP voters when they had their brief moment in the sun came from the old Labour heartlands.

Maybe the working class who work bloody hard for not very much don't want socialists pi55ing their hard earned up against the wall with diversity coordinators and well being facilitators?

Oh, yeah; I forgot The Sun. Another right-wing, working class favourite.

Or did you think all working class people read the Morning Star?

Yes, odd isn’t it that this blows in Rudd’s face just now despite the fact that every body knew this was going on for years and the right wing press didn’t give a single f*ck.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0751828/quotes

Yes prime minister explains all. 

I'm a Liberal Democrat.

Who mentioned the working class anyway. Farage isn't working class, Aaron Banks isn't working class, Boris "watermelon smiles" Johnson isn't working class. Most of the Windrush people are actual workers, Polish brickies are actual workers.60%+ Labour voted Remain, which is an anti racist position 

Yes  very odd.

In the grand scheme of things do we really want her to resign?

I think not.

On the back benches she would be able to vote and campaign for what she believes in  She may be more use there 

Or she could be in the cabinet in one tthe top roles.

not reading a memo is hardly a crime. 

I get 300 plus emails a day. God knows how many any politician gets. Unreal. 

Oh, it's so much easier to blame the evil Tories, the right wing press, stupid thick little Englanders, Daily Mail readers and uneducated working class idiots, thank actually thinking.

The other thing is of course is that people who blame the "nasty right wing of the Tory party and the nasty populist right wing press" for the problem fail to see their part in it.

3

This statement shields the current and previous HS by generalising the problem over a long period, rather than attributing it to a specifically determined policy direction. It is also pretty disregarding of the people whose lives have been ruined.

What's happened is nothing to do with controlling immigration, and bringing that up is simply a distraction.

Again, a great way to undermine legitimate anger is to explain it a cynical partisan point-scoring. There are plenty of outraged Conservative voters.

Again, nothing to do with controlling immigration, everything to do with the perhaps unintended but entirely foreseeable consequences of a deliberately hostile policy direction.

Agreed. She's caught in a trap where she should also resign if she hasn't misled the house, and the previous HS is also implicated.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/28/labour-weaponsing-windrush-...

Gove with an attempt at deflection we can all aspire to.

What's that supposed to mean ? 

How many of that 60% do you imagine were working class (whatever that means these days)? A quarter maybe?

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/29/tory-chairman-brandon-lewis...

More pressure on Rudd. I imagine a resignation is imminent today or tomorrow.

Who cares what class they are  

It 20+ years since I studies politics, but I remember a concept that does not seemed to have been discussed much over the last few weeks. Ministerial responsibility. It is clear that she should have known, there is either a major problem at the Home Office at Civil Service level or she is incompetent or dishonest. Time will tell, but why would they keep it from her.

I think it is well known that the Home Office is a poison chalice because it is to big a portfolio ( Labour got through something like 6 ministers in 8 years - or was it the other way round).

It needs to be split up.

  Because they are incompetent or dishonest: much more likely the former?

 One would assume that before the Commons committee hearing she sat down with her senior officials and asked them to tell her everything that she needed to know before being questioned. It would seem that they failed to do so. Even if she failed to ask one would think they would try to prepare her preoperly.

It seem obvious to me, it was TM who instigated the "crackdown" this got out of hand a bit, chasing quotas etc. Windrush were low hanging fruit, so relatively easy to bump the numbers up by getting rid of them first.

The problem is how does Rudd point the finger at her boss? She could do, but then where's her loyalty points?

Called it!

Go home, secretary

idiot.

I'm not sure Windrush specifically were low-hanging fruit as such.  They are simply, in many cases, people likely to be caught on the wrong side of a crack down.

I'm pretty sure the quota chasing has netted all sorts.  One case causing outrage was interesting to me; a chap who had lived here his whole life, who lost his UK passport while holidaying in Jamaica, who decided to replace it with a Jamaican passport for his return to the UK.  He was denied entry. 

Cue outrage and recriminations of racism.  

Yet their decision seems entirely understandable.  I have experienced exactly the same myself, as a white anglo-saxon, at the UK border - until such time as I could produce incontrovertible proof that I did indeed hold a UK passport.

Having repeatedly arrived in the country under similar circumstances with little issue, clearly something has changed.  It is neither racist, nor plucking easy targets.  It is simply demanding higher levels of evidence from those attempting to gain entrance to the country.

Th 'windrush' generation were and are here legally.

They should not have ever been subjected to removal.

As for targets for illegal immigrants, absolutely we should have such targets and subject to effective challenge return illegal immigrants to their country of origin

I agree with Neil the Home Office is simply too large and unwieldy for one minister..

Back in the early 90s I arrived at Dover only to realise I'd left my passport at home in NE France. Expecting to be put on the next ferry I offered my French Carte de Sejour (with photo & stating I was a UK citizen) & my UK driving licence (no photo) & was allowed in. Not sure if that would happen today.