Labour would end the “hostile environment” immigration policy and close the Yarl’s Wood and Brook House detention centres, Diane Abbott has pledged, saying the party should not be “running scared of the Daily Mail and the Daily Express” on the issue.
In a speech on immigration in the wake of the Windrush scandal, the shadow home secretary said Labour would scrap minimum income requirements for spouses to join partners in the UK and always allow children to do so.
Speaking after it emerged that up to 63 Windrush citizens could have been wrongly deported, Abbott said ministers should also end the “scandalous practice” of children born in Britain being made to pay large fees for citizenship.
Pledging to end indefinite detention on immigration grounds, and barring private contractors including G4S and Serco from taking on contracts to run immigration services, Abbott promised Labour would introduce a more positive message.
Asked after the speech, at the Institute for Public Policy Research thinktank in London, how she envisaged balancing her hope for what she called an “enabling” immigration system with some voters’ concerns on new arrivals, Abbott said it was vital to accentuate the positives.
“I’m one of the first shadow home secretaries to get up here and talk in these terms, and I’m doing it for a reason,” she said. “If Labour under Jeremy Corbyn cannot begin the process of reframing debate on migration – I’m not necessarily talking about specifics – then I think Jeremy will think he has failed.
“We cannot as a Labour party prosecute an immigration policy which is about running scared of the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. We have to own an immigration policy which is based on the facts, and which involves the contribution that migrants make to the economy.”
She added: “The Labour party is under new management, and part of that management is having a very different conversation on migration than we’ve had in the past decades.”
Giving evidence to the home affairs committee on Tuesday, the home secretary, Sajid Javid, said up to 63 Windrush citizens could have been wrongly deported.
Abbott said: “The Windrush scandal goes to the very heart of Theresa May’s hostile environment policy – it was not accidental – it is a direct consequence of government policy.
“The next Labour government will repeal all those parts of the immigration legislation that were introduced to support it. We will rescind all Home Office instructions to carry it out, and we will remove all obligations on landlords, employers and others to enact it.”
On closing Yarl’s Wood and Brook House, she said Labour would divert an estimated £20m a year in savings for work on slavery, trafficking and domestic violence.
Abbott said: “People are being kept in detention for months, even years on end. They include the Windrush generation, victims of torture, refugees and victims of sexual exploitation.”
She added: “Yarl’s Wood in particular has caused so much pain to vulnerable women that we should have been protecting. Diverting these resources directly to them is not only essential, but the right thing to do.”
