The real victims of Windrush
Posted by Mark Cotterill on April 30, 2018 · Leave a Comment
Sajid Javid, the UK’s first Asian Home Secretary
The (Dis-)United Kingdom has its first Asian Home Secretary, after the appointment of Rochdale-born Pakistani Sajid Javid this morning.
This follows last night’s political drama, when Amber Rudd resigned – not because of the epidemic of knife crime. not because of the uncontrolled flood of illegal immigration, but because of the technical ‘offence’ of misleading parliament in the massively hyped Windrush ‘scandal’.
The true scandal of course is that (beginning with the arrival of the former troopship Empire Windrush in 1948) British towns and cities were transformed into multiracial environments – without British voters having any say in the matter.
Yet for the last few days British ministers have been falling over themselves to apologise, not to several generations of our own people whose interests were betrayed, but to a handful of Jamaican immigrants who couldn’t be bothered to obtain proper documentation (such as a UK passport) at any time in the last few decades, so now find themselves unable to prove their legal right of residence.
The technical issue that forced Amber Rudd’s resignation was her department’s ‘target’ for deportations. Sensible Britons are baffled as to why there should be any question of delay in deporting illegal immigrants: but the media and Westminster insiders are constantly cringing before the pro-immigration lobby. Ms Rudd was questioned in front of a parliamentary committee last week and denied that the Home Office had any deportation target. Then on Saturday a leaked letter from 2017 showed Ms Rudd informing the Prime Minister of her intention to increase the deportation target by 10%.
Aside from the historic betrayals over seventy years since the arrival of the Windrush, Theresa May’s government needs to get a grip over continuing immigration from outside the EU, presently totalling more than 200,000 each year, the equivalent of a city the size of York.
As immigration expert and former ambassador Lord Green wrote a few weeks ago, Home Secretary Amber Rudd “has shown no interest at all in concrete steps to reduce immigration. That may be because, as an economic liberal, she is sympathetic to the pre-emptive cries of alarm from industry. But employers’ claims that a reduction in immigration for lower-paid work would harm the economy are simply not supported by the evidence. Indeed, large inflows of cheap labour may have hindered productivity growth, while they have certainly disincentivised training of UK workers by employers. Meanwhile, in 2014/15, the working age benefit bill for EU migrants in the UK was over £4 billion or about £12 million per day – a huge sum.”
Will Sajid Javid – himself the son of a Pakistani immigrant – be likely to respond to the justified concerns of Lord Green, and the clearly expressed views of most British voters on immigration? H&D will be watching our new Home Secretary, but we shall not be holding our breath in anticipation of a new immigration policy, or even a serious implementation of existing policy!
