The term “hostile environment” (Opinion, 30 April) has only, so far, been used in an immigration context. As the widower of a late multiple sclerosis sufferer I also see this political ambience in a number of other areas. Disabled people have been discriminated against over the past several years and have certainly been subjected to a “hostile environment”. And society, in general, has also suffered from the “hostile environment” of the austerity agenda perpetrated on us over the past several years by the “nasty party”. Common to all of this has been Mrs May. I trust that she and her Brexit hardliners will not throw us out into a world economic “hostile environment”.
Dr Stan Moore
Wrexham
• It does not surprise me in the least about the hostile environment for immigrants. I wish the Guardian could discover similar targets for reducing the number of sickness benefit claimants, which has caused so much suffering that many people have killed themselves.
Anne Williams
Hove, East Sussex
• Amber Rudd claims to have understood the Windrush cases as individual rather than as a symptom of a system. The previous week the DWP reported that “only 1% of claimants” have had benefit problems. I convene a small local charity disbursing grants to individuals who are in desperate need – probably people in that 1%. Nearly every case we deal with is an individual difficulty that is actually systemic. Needs are rising faster than we can keep pace with due to benefit sanctions, universal credit delays, lack of mental health support, housing costs beyond people’s means, inhumane immigration decisions, and the costs involved in challenging unfair rulings. These costs are met by individual donors, many of whom are pensioners, and often support is administered by volunteers, also mainly pensioners.
When this patching-up “system” fails because people have to work longer and have smaller pensions, who will then sort out the problems that Amber Rudd and others think are individual cases? The whole system places performativity above care, relying on charities and overstretched caseworkers to pick up the pieces, and then is surprised when it fails.
Anne Watson
Oxford Friends Action on Poverty
• What turned a general problem into the Windrush catastrophe for people who have lived in the UK for decades? Quite simply, the decision by the government to make the production of “proof of residency” compulsory in a range of situations, with the obligation to check pushed down to employers, landlords and hospitals. This policy was introduced, it would seem, with no regard to the potential for “collateral damage” to people legally in the country but without the requisite paperwork, despite the bitter arguments at the time when a proposal was made – and defeated – to introduce national ID cards.
Are we sleepwalking into another fiasco as early as Thursday this week, when a pilot is being undertaken that requires voters to present ID before they can vote in the local elections? Are we about to see the disenfranchisement of another group of people, denied their right to vote because they don’t have the right papers? Any thoughts on what sorts of people are likely to be in this group?
Not content with throwing people into detention or out of the country, the “nasty party” in government seems now intent upon denying many who have managed to cling on, their right to vote for a better outcome.
John Robinson
Deal, Kent
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