Amber Rudd’s handling of the Windrush generation scandal is the latest chapter in an ongoing, often shameful and sometimes scandalous story of postwar British immigration control. Few home secretaries of either main party can be entirely exonerated for their role, and certainly not Ms Rudd. The story, unfortunately, dates back at least to the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush in 1948. In June 1950, the Labour prime minister Clement Attlee set up a secret cabinet committee to review potential means “to check the immigration … of coloured people from the British colonial territories”. The times may be different, but the political responses are all too recognisable.
On Thursday the home secretary was forced to come to the Commons to give the latest in what are beginning to seem like daily apologies for one or other aspect of the government’s immigration-enforcement policy. This time, she acknowledged she had got it wrong on Wednesday when she said the Home Office did not operate a target system for the removal from the UK of illegal migrants. In fact the department had, she now confirmed, operated local targets for “internal use”. On Thursday afternoon the Home Office scrapped those: “I would never support a policy that puts targets ahead of people,” said Ms Rudd.
Yet putting targets ahead of people is precisely what the government has done all along. There are three connected political choices that have created the Windrush scandal – all are target driven. The first was the Conservative party’s 2010 commitment to reducing immigration to the “tens of thousands”, an overarching target from which the party is terrified of retreating. The second is Theresa May’s draconian interpretation, as home secretary, of what was required to achieve that target and to impress public opinion that she was serious. This took the form of the “hostile environment” policy in which those in public and private services were required to police the migration status of their clients.
The third factor was Ms Rudd’s determination to uphold this approach after taking over in 2016, not least because she was committed to defending Mrs May’s prime ministership more generally against the Brexiters. As we reported last week, Ms Rudd boasted privately to Mrs May in early 2017 that she would give immigration officers more “teeth” to hunt down and deport 10% more people than Mrs May had managed. She would do this, she said, partly by switching resources to immigration enforcement from crime-fighting. This has proved to be a double whammy. On Thursday it was announced that knife crime had increased by 22% and gun crime by 11% in 2017.
Both Mrs May and Ms Rudd have repeatedly tried to distinguish between the hostile environment policy, directed at illegal migrants, and the treatment of legal migrants, including the Windrush generation. But the hostile environment is aimed at undocumented migrants, so it has inevitably caught many of the Windrush generation in its net – as well as others. This has been compounded by the inefficiency of the Home Office, whose record-keeping and data systems have long been inadequate.
No party or government can avoid the issue of immigration control. Yet the combination of fanaticism, incompetence and inhumanity exposed by the Windrush scandal pushes it close to the top of the list of the worst and most discreditable policy decisions of the post-2010 era. It’s the policy that is the problem right now. The priority for change must be to make that policy more honest and humane.
