May feels heat from flames

IT HAS been quite a few days for righteous anger. From Kezia Dugdale’s TV demolition of the benefits rape clause to the distraught speeches of Labour MPs John Mann and Luciana Berger in the Commons debate on anti-semitism, politicians have rekindled the raw power of speaking from the heart.

But it was David Lammy’s impassioned condemnation of the Windrush scandal which echoes through the week and still makes the eyes smart with shame.

The inhumane cruelty, as he rightly called it, that discarded the fundamental rights of a generation of Commonwealth Britons on the altar of right-wing rhetoric on immigration is indeed a national disgrace.

We can appreciate the anger even if it is hard for the majority of us, in our privileged white lives, to truly fathom what it must feel like.

Imagine someone telling your mother they were not entitled to be British (or Scottish) any more when all her life she has been nothing else except that.

Imagine being told at the end of your working life, having paid the taxes, obeyed the laws, raised children and grandchildren as best you could while enduring in these three generations the racism from the police, the football terraces, the justice system and much else besides.

Imagine doing that and being told you do not belong. What would you feel like?

Speaking on another issue, the controversial rape clause, Ian Blackford, the SNP Westminster leader, exclaimed at Prime Minister’s Questions “what kind of society do we live in?”

A lot has been said in that chamber this week that should give us pause to ask just that. No one would accuse Theresa May of being racist. She actually had a good record on cutting stop and search when she was home secretary and commissioning a race disparity audit on entering Downing Street.

But it was May as home secretary who determined to create what she termed a “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants which had miserable consequences for the Windrush generation and has mortified the country.

People who have lived here for longer than I’ve been alive are denied residency, lose their jobs, their benefits, their entitlement to the NHS and re-entry to the country they called home.

There are parallels with the rape clause that Blackford mentioned, a deliberately tough policy to act as disincentive without regard for the consequences.

Both immigration and welfare policies are framed to pander to a distorted idea of fairness, to feed this pernicious notion, either in the benefits system or in citizenship, that some of us are deserving and that some are less so.

Instead of telling the truth about immigration – that we need more of it, that these islands have assimilated waves of immigration and benefited from each one – politicians, both left and right, have followed the coward’s route and the populist’s logic.

The Windrush scandal is where you get to when you treat immigration as a numbers game, as raw data instead of people.

This is what you get when you start fanning the far edges of populism, as May did at the 2015 Tory conference to lever her leadership chances.

This is what you get when mainstream politicians start apeing the language of the demagogues and put it into government policy.

Is this the kind of society we want, alienating a whole group of people and bringing shame on the nation?

It is not what May ever intended but if you fan the blaze you should not be surprised when the flames start lapping around your feet.