Meeting of the Parliament 17 September 2019
I welcome the Government’s motion on this issue. However, it is worded very diplomatically. It says that the UK has the
“least family friendly immigration policies in the developed world.”
That does not fully capture the horror and callousness of the UK Government’s immigration policies. They are not just the “least family friendly”—they are overtly hostile and racist.
Last week, my colleague Ross Greer highlighted a couple of individual cases and gave the example of the Home Office officials who were alleged to have lied to their European counterparts in order to illegally deport child trafficking victims. There are many other such examples.
We are all familiar with the examples from the Windrush generation. Paulette Wilson, a mother and grandmother, was detained by the Home Office and threatened with deportation to a country that she had left as a child 50 years previously. She was minutes away from deportation to Jamaica before she received a reprieve. Richard Stewart, a father, was told that he had overstayed and was denied a passport when he wanted to visit his mother’s grave in Jamaica. He died before receiving an apology or any compensation from the UK Government. Sarah O’Connor, a mother, was denied benefits due to not having a passport and was unable to get a job. She ended up having to declare bankruptcy, and she also died before receiving an apology or compensation.
At least 83 members of the Windrush generation were deported. The Home Office has been unable to contact 42 of them. At least 11 have died since, but the full number might be higher. Countless other people have had their lives turned upside down as they have lost jobs, been denied welfare and become homeless because of the racism of the Home Office. In many cases, people have spent thousands of pounds and have been driven into poverty by challenging Home Office decisions. Compensation has been promised, but it has not been forthcoming.
It is not just the Windrush generation. The Home Office was so keen to detain one Nigerian woman that it even held her baby son in detention with her. More than 600 children under the age of 11 have been detained since the Government claimed, back in 2010, that it was committed to ending child detention.
The Home Office has proved time and again that there is no tactic too underhand for it. It used a child’s medical records—comments that she had provided to a psychiatric nurse when she was suicidal—in an attempt to deport a family to Albania by claiming that they were lying about their asylum application. How many families have been thrown into turmoil because of the racism and incompetence of the Home Office? Those examples are the result of deliberate Government policy.
Some changes have been made following the Windrush revelations, but, for the most part, the policies remain. In fact, the Government continues to make the hostile environment even worse. It has now announced that it intends to end family reunification for child asylum seekers—known as the Dublin regulation—if it succeeds in taking the UK out of the EU without a deal.
We must remember that many of those stories originate from before 2015. It is not only about the current Conservative Government; when the policies were introduced, the Conservatives were aided and abetted by the Liberal Democrats. Prior to that, new Labour oversaw the detention of thousands of children for immigration purposes.
The scale of the problems are too great to solve with a few policy changes at the edges. It is not just that the policies are not working for Scotland. If a hostile environment did work for Scotland, it would still be wrong; it does not work for people. It is clear that racism is embedded in the Home Office. That organisation must be abolished if we are to achieve a migration system that is based on compassion and support.