Why is the Home Office so inhumane?

What’s wrong with the Home Office? Almost two years have elapsed since Amelia Gentleman broke the story in The Guardian of Jamaican-born Paulette Wilson. Wilson had come to Britain aged ten,

lived here continuously for fifty years, working and bringing up her daughter – she had no passport, never returned to the Caribbean, nor left the UK. In 2015, the Home Office informed her

that she would have to leave Britain and must no longer work. In October 2017, Paulette Wilson was taken to Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in Bedfordshire, where she was detained for

a week awaiting deportation. Naturally, she was distraught at being declared an illegal immigrant. Jamaica was a foreign country to her. Her local MP, Emma Reynolds, and the Refugee and

Migrant Centre in Wolverhampton managed to rescue her from Heathrow just in time. But she was not out of the woods. The threat of deportation still hung over her. This was the beginning of

the Windrush Scandal.

Such appalling treatment of British citizens began with David Cameron bulldozing measures through the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government – the aim was to reduce the number of

immigrants and culminated in the 2014 Immigration Act. Theresa May, Home Secretary since 2010, was determined to create a “really hostile environment” for illegal immigrants. Norman Baker,

who was Minister in the Home Office at the time, described staff responsible for carrying out the policy as “zealots”, coming up with more inhumane ideas. The touring vans in 2013 with ‘Go

home or be arrested’ emblazoned on them; immigrants avoiding vital medical assistance for fear of being denounced to the authorities; children in detention, were all products of the

Cameron-May policy. So too, were hundreds of people of Caribbean origin, who had worked hard, duly paid their taxes and national insurance, being required to prove that they were legally

British. Many of them were unable to do so and were declared illegal immigrants by the Home Office. A pernicious set of demands made on Home Office staff took precedence over conscience and

whistle-blowing.

The Home Office leadership seemed to glory in meeting government targets for ‘assisted removals’ (a kind of ‘self-deportation’ when, under government pressure, someone leaves without being

deported), with 12,800 set as the target for ‘forced removals’ in 2017-2018. The aim was a 10 per cent increase in “removals” overall. More than eighty of the Windrush generation arrivals

fell foul of the anti-immigrant frenzy and were illegally deported. In April 2018, Theresa May refused a diplomatic request from Caribbean Commonwealth countries. attending the Commonwealth

Heads of Government Meeting in London, to meet them urgently. The Windrush scandal gained international exposure and momentum.

Someone had to take the blame. Inevitably, it was the then Home Secretary, Amber Rudd who had been in post for nearly two years. She denied her Ministry had removal targets then, when

incontrovertible evidence of their existence emerged, claimed in Parliament to have been unaware of them. Even though she was not responsible for creating the policy, her defence was clearly

untenable. She resigned on 26 April 2018.

Did the Home Office, as a result of the public outcry at the scandal, then undergo major changes? No. What were the real causes of the Windrush scandal? There were several. But who was

really responsible?

I recently went to listen to Amelia Gentleman talk about her new book, The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment at the Buxton Festival in Derbyshire. Also on stage was Colin

Grant promoting his book: Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation, a series of moving verbatim reflections on being a British citizen of Caribbean origin. Together they provided a

coherent account of how it had taken so long for “the Windrush betrayal” to be exposed and ended.

Grant, whose father was Jamaican-born, spoke about the way many victims kept their plight and the cause of their suffering to themselves, as a result becoming even more vulnerable to state

bullying. They had grown up with great loyalty and romantic views of Britain. They felt shamed at being singled out – partly a product of defence mechanisms developed over the years against

racism. They did not who to turn to, or how to complain and seek redress. Amelia Gentleman also provided a thorough and balanced account of what went on, providing detailed cases exploring

how victims were victimised and expected to provide often missing documentary evidence to prove their citizenship. Victims were guilty of illegality until they proved themselves innocent.

But to focus only on the varied components in the transmission belt of injustice – from Cameron-May to Rudd to Home Office staff – risks neglecting its prime mover: the Tory leaders who, in

order to appease voters hostile to immigration, initiated policies which produced debilitating anxiety and, often, physical and mental ill-health for victims destined for detention centres

and Heathrow. A reduced Home Office staff, suffering up to 20 per cent cuts, were doing what they were told, obeying orders from above, acting as the promoters of May’s hostile environment.

At the same time, Cameron moved away from multi-culturalism as a policy, towards existing immigrant communities, tacking further into the wind created by hostile public attitudes to

immigrants.

The Home Office is perennially accused of being “not fit for purpose”. Two years have passed now and three things need underlining.

First, if lessons have been learned from the Windrush scandal, there are no signs of that. Only the economic consequences of May’s hostile environment seem to make any impact on policy. The

same callous indifference to human suffering persists in the treatment of asylum seekers and migrants, with the judiciary the last resort for maintaining human rights standards.

Second, the Home Office still awaits reform, notably in training staff to understand something of the conditions and realities in the specific countries from which asylum seekers and

migrants are drawn.

Third, the Home Office needs an institutional moral ethos, free of hostility, in which empathy is not a career hazard. And the ethos of institutions comes from the top.

On the broader question of dealing with inflamed public opinion, the root cause of the Windrush scandal was the failure of government and Parliament to show moral leadership. Government

needs to challenge the baser instincts of citizens, as well as dealing with the legitimate grievances of citizens disturbed by rapid social change. Representative democracy does not mean

robotic obedience to understandable, but often misinformed, popular demands based on fear. Nor the adoption of immigration policies that grievously undermine what we must continue to hope

are British – universal – human values.

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