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Nothing but facts?
“In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!” — Thomas Gradgrind, in Hard Times, by Charles Dickens
This story (see below) is about GPs in England saying there is an inconsistent supply and distribution of Covid vaccines and that this is causing roll-out problems. Embedded in the story is something I’ve known for a long time.
I’m used to seeing standardised, lying statements from my favourite government department, the Home Office, aimed at calming people’s fears and short-circuiting discontent, when both the fears and the discontent are well founded:
“The United Kingdom has a proud record of providing protection to those fleeing persecution … All those seeking asylum are dealt with on their merits.”
No it hasn’t. No they aren’t. And today, it’s interesting to see evidence that this type of statement is not confined to the Home Office but extends across government:
Jeremy Hunt (Chair of Commons Liaison Committee): “Why are the public not allowed to know anything except the most basic information [about the supply and distribution of vaccines]?”
In reply, Johnson promised the government would publish regional breakdowns “later this week” but admitted they were likely to show wide disparities. When it came to vaccinating the over 80s, he said it was “more than 50%, well over 50% now in the north-east and Yorkshire” but added it was “less good in some other parts of the country”.
This reply (bad news as it clearly was) was not the one he was supposed to give. But not to worry. Whitehall can cope with that. The official answer remains the official answer against all inadvertent blurting out of the truth, and he will be reminded of it when he gets back indoors in case he’s asked the question again. Here’s the official answer (otherwise known in Whitehall as “the truth”):
“Vaccines are being distributed fairly across the UK to ensure the most vulnerable are immunised first and all GPs will continue to receive deliveries as planned.” — Department of Health and Social Care unnameable spokesperson.
Oh good. That’s alright then.
GPs in England say inconsistent supply of Covid vaccine causing roll out issues
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/13/gps-in-england-say-inconsistent-supply-of-covid-vaccine-causing-roll-out-issues?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
No reset for the Home Office
When I worked at the international telephone exchange in London (I’m obviously talking about when there were such things, so in the early 1980s) we had to sign the Official Secrets Act. We signed it when we joined and we signed it when we left. When I left, Mr Ignacek, a divisional supervisor, told me: “You have to sign the Act again.”
“What for?” I asked.
“So you don’t blab!” he said.
“Blab?” I said. “What about?!” (We were only a telephone exchange. I wasn’t John Le Carré.)
“Anything,” Iggy said. “You can’t even tell them the colour of the paint on the bloody walls!”
All that was ridiculous and funny. The story (below) of how the Official Secrets Act is being used today to cover up cruelty and ill-treatment of asylum seekers is not funny at all. It’s shameful. And yes, Priti Patel is overseeing it, no doubt with her trademark enthusiasm for bullying way out in front. But, as I said before (see previous two blogs), abuse of asylum seekers goes back through the decades and was perpetrated by governments of all shades. Why did Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett introduce the policy of separating the children of refused asylum seekers from their parents and putting them in care in order to force their terrified parents to take the family back to their dangerous home country? The Head of Asylum Policy at the Home Office in 2006, Rod McLean, told me it was because he wanted to prove to the tabloid press that he was not a “soft touch” when it came to asylum. When I told MacLean that the Refugee Council had said this policy was “not the mark of a civilised society”, he sighed, shrugged his shoulders and said: “Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?”
And so it goes on. In our name. We have to do something about it. Get involved in one of the support groups mentioned in the article, send emails to MPs and ministers, raise the issue in your union branch, invent ways of protesting that are safe during the pandemic. We shouldn’t leave people to the non-existent mercy of our politicians and their civil servants.
Re-what?
After the departure of Cummings and Cain, the new buzzword is “reset”. Johnson will be able to reset Downing Street, reset his politics, reset his relationship with his MPs, reset his government and reset policymaking.
Reset.
A clutter of Tory MPs have said it, former cabinet ministers have said it, and anonymous current ones. Journalists are making sure they use it. Andrew Marr will say it. Sajid Javid was said to be favourite for reset minister.
Prediction: it won’t happen (OK, it’s a hostage to fortune, and my impersonations of the prophet Isaiah have never been that good, but still). Johnson won’t stop trying to fix the judges, he will still appoint the nastiest ones to do jobs like the Spycops inquiry (the judge doing that one told counsel for one of the victims that he couldn’t ask the witness any more questions, and if he tried, “I will silence you”). Priti Patel won’t stop vilifying solicitors for doing their jobs defending their clients, and her Home Office will, as in the story below, defy court orders with impunity. The Home Office has always provided a home for lawless thugs, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen them defy a court order with such arrogance, afterwards saying “It’s business as usual”. And the Orwellian language has reached a new height: their housing subcontractor Mears sent one asylum seeker an eviction notice which read: “You need to leave this property by 11 November 2020. We understand it is a key step in your asylum journey.”
Reset? No, it’s “business as usual”.
I think I’ll stay off the news for the rest of today! And it’s raining.
Home Office accused of breaching court order over asylum seeker evictions
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/nov/06/home-office-high-court-asylum-seeker-evictions-coronavirus?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
EU citizens, present and future: what to do to prepare for Brexit
Here is a link to the government’s latest policy document on immigration arrangements after a no-deal Brexit on 31 October. I comment here on some aspects of these arrangements. The first point to make is that if you are an EU citizen who lives here now but you haven’t yet applied for Settled Status you need to do so now. The best way to do this is through a solicitor. You can do it without one, but I don’t advise it. The Home Office has always operated with a mixture of hostility and incompetence. Under Johnson and the new Home Secretary, Priti Patel, the incompetence levels remain the same but the hostility levels are higher. Don’t take any risks. This warning also applies to people coming here after Brexit. The following are my comments and quotes from the document:
- Anyone moving to the UK from the EU after Brexit “will be able to move to the UK and live, study, work and access benefits and services as they do now” – until 31 December 2020. If they want to stay longer they will have to apply for a new kind of status, called Temporary Leave to Remain (TLR). If they get TLR it will give them only 36 months.
- After January 2021, there will be “a new, Australian-style points-based immigration system”, which the government describes here as a “fairer immigration system that prioritises skills and what people can contribute to the UK, rather than where they came from.” That sounds fair at first, partly because it seems to include all migrants, but it actually limits your chances of staying because the skills you have, and get “points” for, are only the skills that will get you a salary of at least £30,000 a year (according to a government policy announced earlier). If you have skills that earn less than that, you won’t be able to stay.
- EU citizens with TLR “will only be required to apply to the new points-based immigration system when their 36 months’ Euro TLR leave expires”, although they can do it earlier. But if they do not “meet the … criteria under the new [points-based] immigration system or otherwise have a right to remain in the UK, they will be expected to leave the UK when their Euro TLR expires. Euro TLR will therefore only provide a temporary stay in the UK for some EU citizens.”
Make no mistake: “they will be expected to leave the UK” is not friendly advice: “EU citizens and their family members who move to the UK after 31 October 2019 will need to have applied for a UK immigration status (whether Euro TLR or under the new, points-based immigration system) by 31 December 2020. Otherwise, they will be here unlawfully and will be liable to enforcement action, detention and removal as an immigration offender.”
- “enforcement action” = they will take you from your home;
- “detention” = they will put you in prison;
- “removal” = they will force you onto a plane and fly you out
Here is the government document:
Don’t take any risks
This almost certainly means another Windrush scandal, this time for EU citizens who don’t have the right bits of paper (maybe they’ve lost them, maybe they were never sent them, maybe the Home Office (true to its its traditional mix of inefficiency and hostility) has also “lost” them). Anyone who has not applied for settled status should do 3 things:
(1) assume the Home Office is hostile to you (no, don’t say, “Why, I’ve done nothing wrong?” – they don’t care about that. Just assume they’re hostile;
(2) Get a solicitor (no, don’t say “I can do it myself.” You can’t under this new policy. Don’t say, “I can’t afford it” – You can’t afford not to.
(3) Do it now. Especially if you’re not sure about your documents or your ID. But even if you are, do it now. It would be foolish to trust the government’s word, for example, that you have till December 2020. That can change. It probably will. So will lots of other things. Do it now.
Similar advice to non-EU migrants waiting for decisions on your status or on the status of a family member. Read any Home Office or Foreign Office letter you get carefully. If you don’t understand the letter or if there’s any part of it you’re not sure of, get someone else to read it with you (do that even if you think you are sure of what it says), go to your MP, or Citizen’s Advice, or get a solicitor.
This announcement today means we are now entering an even more hostile environment than before. Don’t take any risks.
No ifs, no buts – Labour must support free movement
At a jamboree of the G7 interior ministers this week, the French minister, Christophe Castaner, took his chance to attack the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) saving migrants from their sinking vessels in the Mediterranean. The NGOs, said M. Castaner, were “complicit” with the people traffickers.[1] This was in line with his president’s view of the matter: last summer Macron declared that the NGOs were “playing the game of the smugglers”. In saying what he did at the end of this week’s conference, Castaner joined forces with his far-right Italian counterpart, Matteo Salvini, who had also said, during the conference, that there was “collusion” between the NGOs and the traffickers. Salvini’s contribution seemed to be a reassertion of the Italian far right’s earlier campaign against the rescue ships, calling them “the taxis of the sea”.
There is no mention here of our own home secretary, Savid Javid, who has just been forced to apologise for the Home Office’s treatment of the Windrush generation, an affair which also resulted in death for some of its victims. Javid said it was all a terrible mistake, and that it will never happen again. He then popped back to the office where his officials are continuing to steal, and keep, the UK passports of up to 6,000 British-Iraqi citizens on the spurious ground of finding discrepancies in their dates of birth. The Home Office knows full well that many Iraqi Kurds (and most of these people are Kurdish) are uncertain about their dates of birth. Historically, records were not kept in the same way as in the West. The Home Office knows this, yet, cruelly, it persists. The hostile environment continues.
But back to Christophe and Matteo. The “let them drown” brigade in Europe began its campaign some time ago. The UK was complicit.[2] The far right is getting its act together across the world. Will we continue to be complicit? Nothing suggests that the Tory Party will suddenly become migrant-friendly. Its leadership after May will become more right-wing, its home secretary (Javid or otherwise) will become more migrant-hostile.
That’s not where the Labour Party wants to go. Its 2017 election manifesto made this clear:
Labour will not scapegoat migrants nor blame them for economic failures … We will not discriminate between people of different races or creeds. We will end indefinite detentions … Labour will protect those already working here, whatever their ethnicity … Labour values the economic and social contributions of immigrants. Both public and private sector employers depend on immigrants. We will not denigrate those workers. We value their contributions, including their tax contributions … Labour will restore the rights of migrant domestic workers, and end this form of modern slavery … Refugees are not migrants. They have been forced from their homes, by war, famine or other disasters. Unlike the Tories, we will uphold the proud British tradition of honouring the spirit of international law and our moral obligations by taking our fair share of refugees. The current arrangements for housing and dispersing refugees are not fit for purpose. They are not fair to refugees or to our communities. We will review these arrangements.[3]
But if Labour doesn’t want to go down the same road as the Tories, it now has to change its stance on freedom of movement – for its current position, also set out in the manifesto, undermines these commitments. “Freedom of movement will end”, says the manifesto, “when we leave the European Union.” The reason for this was suggested by Emily Thornberry in an interview, apparently citing voters’ concerns about immigration:
As for the single market, you know and I know that it’s very difficult for us to remain in the single market as it currently is because nobody can pretend that the referendum didn’t include a debate on immigration and we want to have fair rules and managed migration when it comes to immigration so we need to negotiate something.[4]
But we are on dangerous ground here. Conceding to voters’ concerns and fears is no substitute for facing them honestly and allaying them. So what are the concerns that voters have about immigration? One of them is the idea that immigrants take jobs from the native population and depress wages. Liberal leader Vince Cable has summarised some of the arguments on this:
At the heart of the politics of immigration is the belief, repeated by Theresa May as a fact, that immigrants, especially unskilled immigrants, depress wages. At first sight the argument seems plausible – and undeniably there is low-wage competition in some places. But there is no evidence that this is a general problem. [In 2013, during the coalition government] I commissioned a range of reviews and studies to establish the facts. They showed that the impact on wages was very small (and only in recession conditions). By and large, immigrants were doing jobs that British people didn’t want to do (or highly skilled jobs that helped to generate work for others). This research was inconvenient to the Home Office, which vetoed the publication of its results.[5]
In 2016, Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies produced a report and asked:
But aren’t all these foreigners taking our jobs? That’s true in the Premier League. The more foreign footballers there are playing for the top clubs, the fewer English players there will be. There’s only room for 11 players in a starting XI.
Yet there is not a fixed number of jobs in the economy. There are seven million more people in work in the UK than there were 40 years ago. Astonishingly, there are nearly two million more than immediately before the recession in 2008. Employment rates among the UK-born are close to record levels. More people means more jobs, not more unemployment. There is absolutely no evidence that higher levels of immigration have increased unemployment among native-born Brits.[6]
On wage levels he wrote:
Evidence on wage impacts is a bit less conclusive. While many studies do not find any evidence of immigration depressing wages, a recent Bank of England paper suggests that the impact of migration on UK-born lower-skilled workers might have been to reduce wages by 1 per cent over a period of eight years. Thus it may have played a part, though only a minor one, in recent experience of low or negative pay growth.[7]
In fact, instead of seeing the fears and concerns of people as a reason for declaring an end to free movement, Thornberry could have argued those points and others in order to allay them and embrace free movement. Labour’s failure to do this had its impact on the Labour manifesto itself. First, the Tory White Paper on immigration post-Brexit included an income threshold of £30,000 p.a. which migrants would have to meet before they could have the right to work.[8] This would keep the poor out, and because of the way poverty is structured it would discriminate by race and ethnicity too. Labour’s response was:
We will replace income thresholds with a prohibition on recourse to public funds. New rules will be equally informed by negotiations with the EU and other partners, including the Commonwealth.[9]
This suggests that the “no recourse to public funds” rule would apply to EU and Commonwealth citizens alike, and it has the same effect as the Tory proposal: it discriminates against the poor and in the end it also discriminates by race and ethnicity.
Secondly, Tory policy matches this exclusion of the poor with “a new, skills-based immigration system”. Such a system “will mean we can reduce the number of people coming to this country, as we promised”.[10] On this, Labour’s manifesto (p. 28) says a Labour government would work
with businesses, trade unions, devolved governments and others to identify specific labour and skill shortages. Working together we will institute a new system which is based on our economic needs, balancing controls and existing entitlements.
This sounds no different to a Tory skills-based system.
The failure to defend immigration also led to the fiasco of Labour’s front bench at first whipping to abstain on the government’s Immigration and Social Security Bill a few weeks ago. There were many reasons to vote against the Bill. As David Lammy MP described it:
It will force our NHS and other vital services into an even deeper staffing crisis. There are already 41,000 nursing vacancies in England. The salary threshold still under consideration would exclude many skilled medical staff, including nurses, paramedics and midwives.
It continues the inhumane practice of indefinite detention. We remain the only European country which does not set a time limit for detained migrants. This sullies our international reputation and undermines complaints we make about human rights abuses abroad.
The 1.2 million [UK citizens in Europe] will inevitably see their own rights eroded too. Overnight they could lose their ability to live and work freely in Europe. Young people who overwhelmingly want the chance to live across the continent are having their horizons permanently narrowed.[11]
But Diane Abbott argued at the time:
The Labour [P]arty is clear that when Britain leaves the single market, freedom of movement ends, and we set this out in our 2017 manifesto. I am a slavish devotee of that magnificent document: so on that basis, the frontbench of the Labour [P]arty will not be opposing this bill this evening.[12]
In the event, the Labour front bench changed its mind and whipped MPs to vote against the Bill, rather than abstain, after protests by several MPs and an immediate on-line and email protest from Labour activists and others. But it took the front bench 90 minutes to do this, after MPs had originally been told they could go home as their votes were not required. Many of them did. Only 178 out of 256 Labour MPs were present to vote.[13]
Labour, under its present leadership, and with its expanded membership, is better than this. At a time when far-right forces are getting their act together, Labour should do so too, giving not an inch of ground to racism and xenophobia, whether it comes from politicians in France, Italy, Brazil, or the United States, or whether it is home-grown. In the Brexit arguments we should be fully in favour of the right to travel, to move from anywhere to anywhere, and for whatever reason: we should be in favour of the right to free movement.
[1]« Castaner accuse les ONG d’être complices des passeurs » Le Monde, 6 April 2019: https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2019/04/06/castaner-accuse-les-ong-d-etre-complices-des-passeurs_5446576_3210.html
[2] “Mediterranean Massacre”: https://bobmouncerblog.wordpress.com/2015/04/22/mediterranean-massacre-job-done/
[3] For The Many Not The Few: The Labour Party Manifesto 2017, pp. 28-29: https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/labour-manifesto-2017.pdf
[4] “Labour signals that Britain should remain in customs union”, Irish Times, 18 February 2018: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/uk/labour-signals-that-britain-should-remain-in-customs-union-1.3396757
[5] “The Tory fallacy: that migrants are taking British jobs and driving down wages”:
[6] Immigration limits won’t lift Britain: https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/8317
[7] Ibid.
[8] White Paper: “The UK’s future skills-based immigration system”: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/766465/The-UKs-future-skills-based-immigration-system-print-ready.pdf, p. 3.
[9]For The Many Not The Few: The Labour Party Manifesto 2017, p. 28: https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/labour-manifesto-2017.pdf
[10] White Paper: “The UK’s future skills-based immigration system”: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/766465/The-UKs-future-skills-based-immigration-system-print-ready.pdf, p. 3.
[11] In a series of three tweets on 28 January 2019, before the front bench change of mind, declaring his intention to vote against the Bill.
[12] House of Commons debate, 28 January 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jan/28/labour-in-embarrassing-u-turn-over-immigration-bill-vote
[13] By my calculation, since the government won the vote by 297 votes to 234 (a majority of 63), if the full quota of Labour MPs had turned up to vote against them (another 78), the government would have lost the vote on the Bill.
Freedom of Movement – I
“People voted”, declared a Tory MP during one of the interminable Brexit debates recently, “to end uncontrolled immigration” from the EU. Some people may have done, but if they did, what they were voting to end was nothing more than a figment of, say, Nigel Farage’s imagination. Freedom of movement within the EU was never uncontrolled. But slogans can become powerful tools. We need, said the various Leave campaigns – and later, after a rapid conversion, Theresa May – to “take back control of our borders”. The truth is that we never lost control of them.
The European Parliament’s Fact Sheet on the freedom of movement of workers certainly confirms that “every EU citizen has the right to reside in the territory of another EU country with no conditions or formalities other than the requirement to hold a valid identity card or passport.”[1] But that’s only for the first three months. After that, the country to which the EU citizen has moved has the right to take control: the host member state has the right to “require a citizen to register his or her presence within a reasonable and non-discriminatory period of time.”[2] Then the rules get tougher, as, “for EU citizens who are not workers or self-employed, the right of residence depends on their having sufficient resources not to become a burden on the host Member State’s social assistance system, and having sickness insurance.”[3] Moreover, EU citizens have no right of permanent residence in another EU country until they have completed “five years of uninterrupted legal residence”.[4]
But can’t they come and live off “our benefits” for as long as they like? No. Indeed, the European Court of Justice
recently rejected the right to benefits of an inactive EU citizen who had entered the host Member State solely for the purpose of claiming benefits (Case C-333/13 Dano): it held that the right to equal treatment, which would include access to benefits, presupposes legal residence … which the claimant did not have owing to a lack of sufficient financial means.[5]
One puzzled writer to The Guardian’s Letters page in 2017, Paul Whitaker, summed up the situation:
Since 2004, European Union law has allowed governments to control movements of European citizens as follows: allow EU citizens to freely circulate only for three months and then require them (should they want to stay longer) to show they are working (employed or self-employed), a registered student or have sufficient resources (pension, savings) to support themselves and comprehensive sickness insurance, e.g. a valid European health insurance card enabling the NHS to claim back the cost of treatment or have private health insurance. The UK is one of the few governments that has not implemented this.[6]
He then asks a pertinent question:
For six years, Theresa May was in charge of the Home Office responsible for immigration, yet did nothing to adopt these conditions. One wonders why not and why immigration was allowed to dominate the referendum and is still being paraded as a big problem. Yet another failure of our own government and the Home Office under Theresa May is being blamed on the EU. The remedy was always in the UK’s hands.[7]
But Paul Whitaker hasn’t quite got it right here at the end. For surely there was nothing to remedy, since freedom of movement was doing a lot of good to this host member state. Growing numbers of its citizens were also making the journey in the opposite direction, taking up opportunities to work or retire in other EU countries. What’s to remedy? But then came the riot of fantasy that was the EU referendum, and the panic that followed.
[1] European Parliament Fact Sheet, “Free Movement of Workers: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/factsheets/en/sheet/41/free-movement-of-workers
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] “EU rules already offer a solution on freedom of movement”, Letters, The Guardian, 8 January 2017: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/08/eu-rules-already-offer-a-solution-on-freedom-of-movement
[7] Ibid.
We must ensure that nobody will ever again be afraid to ask for medical treatment
We really do have to get rid of this Tory government and replace it with a Labour government different from any other. This story (see link below) about asylum seekers being afraid to get NHS treatment is just one of many reasons. Asylum seekers are afraid of being presented with a bill they have no means of paying, and they are afraid of the Home Office. The groundwork was laid for such fears a good number of years ago by governments of all stripes. A Labour Health Secretary was one who helped. At the end of my research into the treatment of asylum seekers, which I finished in 2010,[1] I wrote this in the wake of the news that an asylum seeker had been refused cancer treatment:
On 30 March 2009 the UK Court of Appeal ruled that failed asylum seekers were not entitled to free National Health Service treatment in England, overruling an earlier High Court ruling that they were. One exception was allowed: if an asylum seeker cannot return home and cannot pay in advance hospitals must consider treatment, but they were at the mercy of the discretion of the hospital. Lord Justice Ward expressed his views on failed asylum seekers clearly: they should not be here and should never have come in the first place. Health Secretary Alan Johnson was “pleased with the Court of Appeal’s judgment that asylum seekers cannot acquire ordinary resident status which would entitle them to treatment and a range of other services.”
When Jeremy Corbyn protests about a Tory statement or policy, the reply often comes back “Labour did the same thing.” Those of us in the Labour Party should always acknowledge the fact when it’s true and we will all have to make sure things are different next time by constantly holding Labour ministers to account. Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott has said clearly, when speaking of the Windrush scandal, “This will not happen when I am Home Secretary.” She will face strong opposition from Home Office officials who are currently enjoying the implementation of the “hostile environment”. We will have to support her, and support asylum seekers, in every way possible, against the pressures, not only of the Home Office establishment, but also of the Tories and their media. And it must never be the case again that vulnerable people are bullied so that they are afraid to ask for medical help. That, among many other reasons, is why I and thousands of other people joined or rejoined the Labour Party when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader in 2015. We saw a different future.
Asylum seekers ‘too afraid’ to seek NHS care, report says
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/nov/28/asylum-seekers-too-afraid-to-seek-nhs-care-report-says?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
[1] Dealt with on their Merits: https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:2678
The Tory hostile environment continues – but Labour must face up to its past
No sympathy should be wasted on Amber Rudd. Her role in the Windrush scandal can be dealt with swiftly. According to the Home Office memo sent to Rudd and other ministers:
- The Home Office set a “target of achieving 12,800 enforced returns in 2017-18 … we have extended our target of assisted returns[1]
- This target set the government on a “path towards a 10% increased performance on enforced returns, which we promised the Home Secretary earlier this year.”[2]
- Rudd set the target “personally”.[3]
So her responsibility for what happened is established and her claim to know nothing about targets is rubbish.
However, this isn’t just about the Windrush generation or even their descendants. The injustice done to them is manifest and for many of them a tragedy. But this story of targets goes wider than this particular scandal. It is about a very real and ongoing hostility at the Home Office towards migrants in general and asylum seekers in particular.
The memo cited above speaks of “assisted returns”, a category which certainly does include asylum seekers. “Typically”, says the memo, “these will be our most vulnerable returnees.”[4] The use of the word “vulnerable” does not indicate sympathy any more than talk of “assisted returns” indicates a helpful approach. When Home Office officials use the word “assisted” it means the same as when they use the word “enforced”.[5] It means you’ve got to go, we don’t believe you, we don’t want you, didn’t you understand the message on Theresa’s big van? – GO HOME.
I described what happens when you are in the hands of the Home Office in earlier blogs.[6] As I said in these blogs, during my research as long ago as 2007 I found that what was called an “agenda of disbelief” had permeated the asylum process. This was encouraged by section 8 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants) Act 2004, which obliged “a deciding authority” to “take account, as damaging the claimant’s credibility, of any behaviour” specified as such. I gave several examples of how, in the frantic rush to find “credibility issues”, Home Office officials forgot the UN Guidelines urging them to give, wherever possible, “the benefit of the doubt” to asylum seekers’ accounts of persecution or torture and instead set up what asylum support and human rights groups called an “agenda of disbelief” which enabled them to cast doubt on the stories told by large numbers of applicants who had indeed been persecuted or tortured.[7]
The focus today is not on section 8 of that Act but on paragraph 322(5) of the Immigration Rules. Caseworkers are using this paragraph to justify refusing indefinite leave to remain (ILR) to 1,000 highly skilled migrants by claiming they are guilty of lying in their applications, typically about their incomes or their tax records. Growing numbers are taking their cases to court – and winning. According to The Guardian, among the cases waiting to be resolved are
a former Ministry of Defence mechanical engineer who is now destitute, a former NHS manager currently £30,000 in debt, thanks to Home Office costs and legal fees, who spends her nights fully dressed, sitting in her front room with a suitcase in case enforcement teams arrive to deport her, and a scientist working on the development of anti-cancer drugs who is now unable to work, rent or access the NHS.[8]
Saleem Dadabhoy is unlikely to become destitute or fall into debt, since he is
a scion of one of the wealthiest families in Pakistan, [facing] deportation under [para.] 322(5) despite three different appeal courts having scrutinised his accounts and finding no evidence of any irregularities, and a court of appeal judge having ruled that he is trustworthy and credible.[9]
Others connected to him, however, might well face debt or destitution: if he were to be deported, 20 people employed by him would lose their jobs and the company (worth £1.5m) would close.
It has become clear that all this is the result not just of Amber Rudd’s time at the Home Office but of Theresa May’s creation of a “hostile environment” when she was in the same job. However, it goes back further than that. The examples I have given of the “agenda of disbelief” relate to Labour’s time in office. The hostile environment, in fact, goes back to Tony Blair, who set targets for asylum seeker deportations, and to Home Secretary David Blunkett, who had kids separated from their parents and put into local authority care in order to persuade their parents to go home when they were afraid to do so. Rod McLean, Head of Asylum Policy at the Home Office in 2006, told me this was because Blunkett was making policy “with an eye to the media”, who wanted tougher measures on removals. He then told me the policy would be abandoned “because it hasn’t worked”. I asked him, “When you say it hasn’t worked do you mean that, instead of waiting for you to take their children away, they just disappear?” “Yes,” he said. Unfortunately the policy wasn’t abandoned – it remained on the statute book.[10]
I believe that Labour not only has to blame the Tories for the “hostile environment” but own up to its own past, when it presided over an “agenda of disbelief”, in which asylum seekers were considered guilty until proved innocent. Because if Labour doesn’t recognise its past it will be in danger of repeating it. This is not to cast doubt on Corbyn’s best intentions – but the tabloids are still there, and so are the successors of Rod McLean.
Immigration Rules, para. 322: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/immigration-rules/immigration-rules-part-9-grounds-for-refusal
[1] “Amber Rudd was sent targets for migrant removal, leak reveals”, The Guardian¸ 28 April 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/apr/27/amber-rudd-was-told-about-migrant-removal-targets-leak-reveals
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., see the “Q & A” box, “What are enforced departures?”
[6] https://bobmouncerblog.wordpress.com/2018/02/12/the-secretary-of-state-still-doesnt-believe-you-2/
https://bobmouncerblog.wordpress.com/2018/02/14/inappropriate-behaviour/
[7] See Dealt with on their Merits, pp.151-162: https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/assets/hull:2678a/content
[8] “At least 1,000 highly skilled migrants wrongly face deportation, experts reveal”, The Observer, 6 May 2018:
[9] Ibid.
[10] See Dealt with on their Merits, pp.220-221: https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/assets/hull:2678a/content
Inappropriate behaviour
Further to yesterday’s blog.[1]
In a story this morning (14/2/2018), The Guardian quotes a Commons Home Affairs Committee report saying that “people lawfully in Britain were being caught up in the ‘hostile environment’ [in the Home Office] meant to be aimed at individuals with no right to be here.”[2] The story gives as an example the case of Haruko Tomioka, a Japanese woman lawfully in the UK, who was
given seven days to leave the country, [the report] said. “This followed a two-year period during which time her driving licence had been rescinded, child benefit payments had been stopped (she had also been ordered to repay £5,000), and she was made to report to Becket House immigration office on a regular basis.” It took repeated notifications to the Home Office that she was here legally and that her husband was an EU national in employment before the department finally accepted her rights.
Clearly this involved a great deal of hostility directed towards someone with every right to be here. This can come as no surprise. Home Office hostility is indiscriminate. There is a “culture of hostility” in the Home Office which both allowed Haruko Tomioka to be put through this mill and led to Reza and Maryam’s treatment described in my blog yesterday. Whether a fair policy towards EU citizens is developed or not (and it looks increasingly unlikely), and whether the apparent problem of understaffing in the Home Office (mentioned yesterday) is tackled or not (it’s been used as an excuse for a whole raft of misdemeanours for a very long time and may be too useful for it to be abandoned now), the “hostile environment” towards migrants (especially asylum seekers) is deliberate policy and is set to continue.
Do we want our taxes to pay for a culture of hostility in the Home Office? If you come here seeking asylum or a new life, and if you really do have to be questioned about your reasons and intentions, should that be done in a “hostile environment”? If it is, cases like these will proliferate. The hostility outlined in yesterday’s blog was obviously indiscriminate, directed at people before any decision had been made about their “right to be here”. Home Office officials make assumptions about your motives before a single question has been asked.
Yet you ought to be treated as innocent until proved guilty. That’s not just an idea I woke up with this morning. It’s the basis of our legal system. And it’s laid down in the Refugee Convention Guidelines. So hostility is inappropriate behaviour. That needs to be included in the alleged exemplary training given to Home Office staff and trumpeted by the department yesterday. The Commons Home Affairs Committee should be told the same thing. Its members seem to think hostility is OK if it’s “aimed at individuals with no right to be here”. It isn’t. If officials really need to ask questions, they should just ask them. They don’t need to shake their prejudiced fists as well.
[1] “The Secretary of State [still] doesn’t believe you”: https://bobmouncerblog.wordpress.com/2018/02/12/the-secretary-of-state-still-doesnt-believe-you-2/
[2] “Brexit immigration plan delays are fuelling anxiety, MPs warn”: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/feb/14/brexit-immigration-plan-delays-fuelling-anxiety-mps-warn?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
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