Windrush failures
Words fail at the levels of immoral ineptitude whereby people who have an ongoing right to be in the UK - a place where they've worked, paid taxes and in some cases have retired and are receiving state pension - but are suddenly being sent "back home" to places they don't know, haven't visited etc.
We don't know what possessed Theresa "send 'em home" May to set in motion the policies that got us to do this point. It is said that she had been warned that the tough stance on immigration would have a serious effect on migrant communities that kept this country afloat in the 1960s and 1970s.
It might be that she simply doesn't care. She has the self awareness to know which side her bread is buttered and knows whose support she really needs to stay in power. Maybe she's counted the votes she'd lose and has weighed them against the UKIP vote.
It might be that she's totally incompetent. That she didn't listen when people said that this was an inevitable result of the hard-line policies, but she didn't listen. Didn't care. Didn't believe the warnings.
It might be that she had too much faith in "the system" being able to identify and solve the problems. Which, in fairness, one might think it should be able to do.
I mean - how does one get to the point of having a state pension and the system then trying to make out that you are not entitled to NHS care?
Either way, you'd think with her direct responsibility for immigration policy and her current premiership overseeing the chaos that the natural thing would be to resign.
But she won't, will she?
We don't know what possessed Theresa "send 'em home" May to set in motion the policies that got us to do this point. It is said that she had been warned that the tough stance on immigration would have a serious effect on migrant communities that kept this country afloat in the 1960s and 1970s.
It might be that she simply doesn't care. She has the self awareness to know which side her bread is buttered and knows whose support she really needs to stay in power. Maybe she's counted the votes she'd lose and has weighed them against the UKIP vote.
It might be that she's totally incompetent. That she didn't listen when people said that this was an inevitable result of the hard-line policies, but she didn't listen. Didn't care. Didn't believe the warnings.
It might be that she had too much faith in "the system" being able to identify and solve the problems. Which, in fairness, one might think it should be able to do.
I mean - how does one get to the point of having a state pension and the system then trying to make out that you are not entitled to NHS care?
Either way, you'd think with her direct responsibility for immigration policy and her current premiership overseeing the chaos that the natural thing would be to resign.
But she won't, will she?
This discussion has been closed.

Comments
"Out of touch" is an overworked phrase.
Our government has a lot to answer for over immigration. The current Windrush fiasco is but the latest of a series of diabolical steps, that will eventually lead this country to disaster. And, forcing May and the Tories out won't even make much difference as long as the people swallow whole sale a bunch of lies and the nation moves away from British values towards something closer to the attitudes of 1930s Germany that millions died to put an end to. We need political leaders who will stand and lead us to where we should be going, not time servers who will do whatever is popular enough to make sure they retain their over-paid seats in Westminster..
Evidence for that? I've been a civil servant for 26 years and not come across any colleague who fits that description.
My sense is more of people beaten down by targets, performance management and all the other tools of authoritarian capitalism imported into the public sphere.
Pretty much every job that's been 'outsourced'.
At the very least, I long for the times when ministers who oversaw blatent cockups would immediately resign. The fact the they are blaming civil servants is appaling. They have responsibility for their departments.
Actually, I long for the the time when ministers considered themselves servants of the people, not above the criminal and moral law.
You’ve never come across a colleague that was just there for the pay-cheque? In 26 years?
I have witnessed a situation in which Cog A said X could not happen before Y and Cog B said Y could not happen without X being done first. Both were doing their jobs as the jobs were described, but neither were properly serving their client. Neither were going to give until the issue was taken to a supervisor. Who also said it couldn't be done and then eventually relented. Reluctantly.
I could list a multitude of similar situations in which people Did Their Job with no thought to how it actually worked.
If you truly did not witness anything like that in 26 years, I am amazed. But then I never did have the opportunity to interact with the Crown Unicorn Bureau.
Sarcasm aside, that is how large entities work. There will be rules and people who follow them with no thought to what it means outside of their little part of the machine.
I am not throwing the rank and file under the bus. I think the instigators need to be stood in front of the metaphorical wall. With blindfold and cigarette, if they choose. Yes, the ministers need to be accountable, I am not trying to transfer the main blame.
The problem is in the way that the policy has been designed. Presumably it could have been written so that people who had been here long enough (for example) to earn a full state pension (which I think is 40 years) would have been judged to have earned citizenship and residency. Presumably they could have sent in place various other protections for migrants from the 1960s and 1970s and their descendants.
But as they didn't, I'm guessing that the people making frontline decisions on immigration cases have no leeway to allow any difference in the acceptable paperwork needed for someone who has been here 8 years or 50.
That's the real scandal. Up to that point, whether the boarding cards existed or not didn't matter, because people didn't need them. But once they'd been destroyed, it only took an arbitrary change in the rules to screw everything up.
It created two tier citizenship - its illegal under international law to make someone stateless, so it could only ever be directed at dual citizens.
According to the account I heard, originally British subjects were entitled to come and work in the UK, a rule that was being examined in the 1940s when the cost of international travel went down so far that it actually became affordable for non-white people to consider coming to Blighty. Prior to that few did because of the enormous cost.
Anyway, apparently there was some talk of not allowing the ships to dock. It turned out that this wasn't legally possible because of the status of the people. In the end it was thought not to be worth the effort to change the law to keep the migrant out, because (of all things) it was thought that British weather would force them back to sunnier climes.
AFAIU, until the law was changed later, British subjects in the Empire could come and work in the UK. And as laws can't normally be retrospective anyway, anyone who was here from before the rule changes were entitled to the same ongoing rights.
I think the point should more be that everyone was an immigrant.
Yes, I have been fortunate. I'm sure there are such people. But the attitude that says 'you are a government worker therefore you are just a cog' is worse.
If you're just going to project your own prejudices onto information from a former civil servant who did and still does give a shit you're hardly qualified to comment.
Deporting someone who has lived in the UK their whole working life, because you've just discovered that someone made a clerical error in 1967 is a complete nonsense. It is the behaviour of people with neither honour nor scruples.
Couldn't agree more. None of this is a matter of a clerical error. It was a decision made a long way up the ladder (maybe not by a minister) but the minister is there to carry the can.
When it comes to policy civil servants can only advise. They cannot decide. Scrapping the only records legitimising a persons arrival and presence in the UK is a political decision. Civil servants advised against the 2014 rule changes and also destroying the cards but the rules were changed and the cards were destroyed anyway. All to satisfy the xenophobic end of public opinion and the Daily Mail and its pals.
Don't I know it. Our youngest was born in Malta (in 1996) and to make things even more interesting Mrs Sioni was also born in Malta. We had to provide our marriage certificate and both birth certificates for his first adult passport.
Still, if we leave the EU it looks like he can get Maltese citizenship (but not nationality).
Agreed. I would take the view that if you have lived openly in a country for an extended period of time under the good faith belief that you had the permanent right to live there, you should be grandfathered in, regardless of the technicalities. The idea that we are even asking people who have been here most of their lives to prove their right to be here is absurd.
If you've been staying under the radar, working in the cash economy, and trying to avoid official notice, that might be a different matter, but not for people who are just living normal lives and trying to follow the rules.
preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience
My statements on civil service and other large entities are based on both actual experience and reason.
Admittedly though, I took a cursory look at your link and did prejudge it. My apologies for that.
So I went back and read the section on Speaking Truth to Power. And, though I will admit it is not designed to be so, I still find it massively disheartening. The outline of the issues of speaking to power is well done. The solutions seem reasonable, if you have never actually had a chance to see them in operation. The circumstances that need to occur for a positive result are rare. Everything has to be just right or the speaker gets punished and/or ignored. I've seen rare groups/departments that were truly focused on doing what is best for the public. In the Windrush document destruction, people did speak up. And it changed nothing.
I've started reading the bits on recruiting. So far, the advice is solid. But it will also not happen. Not at enough of a scale to make a difference. It is all the more depressing a read because it is futile.
Has anyone in the history of political discourse ever said something like this without it actually meaning “our leaders should do what I believe is best whether it’s popular or not”?
Statements like this are stupid because there is no such thing as a single objective definition of “where we should be going”. If there was then we wouldn’t need to have elections in order to determine which definition we’re going to follow for the next few years.
Or, at least someone who isn't going to lead us off a cliff edge into economic decline, international irrelevance and throwing out all the good things about Britain - including being an open country with people willing to go out of their way to help others and be fair to others.
More Commonwealth immigrants affected
So are the fascists, the racists, the Brexiteers and everyone else with whom you disagree. If any of them was calling for the government to show "strong leadership" by doing what they want them to do regardless of how many other people disagree then you'd throw a fit, so why should you get to call for the same thing?