Kelly Lessons not learned from Lawrence probe

tion Acts of 2014 and 2016 were designed in her words “to create a hostile environment” for those in the UK illegally, which culminated in the “go home or face arrest” immigration vans – white vans, naturally – touring immigrant communities.

The Windrush generation have never been asked for any documentation before until these Acts. And the fact that the landing cards belonging to Windrush migrants were destroyed in 2010 didn’t help.

One victim was Albert Thompson who, as a result of being unable to provide documentary evidence that had never existed to prove he’d lived here for 44 years, was made unable to work, evicted and denied cancer treatment.

When pictured, Mr Thompson doesn’t appear to smile a lot. I wonder what former Detective Superintendent Bill Mellish, who led the second investigation into Stephen Lawrence’s murder, would make of this.

In the documentary he said the habit of Doreen Lawrence – now Baroness Lawrence – of not smiling was a gimmick as he criticised her treatment of the police. He said: “It was unrelenting criticism, not a smile.”

Mellish also claimed it was “utter rubbish” to accuse the police force of institutional racism in the wake of Stephens’s murder, slamming the public inquiry that led to the Macpherson report as a “kangaroo court”.

He’d been in the Met 32 years and he’d know if it was racist, he said, giving the impression he thinks he knows everything.

Police officers thinking they knew everything was of course at the root of the original failed Stephen Lawrence murder inquiry.

Some people will never learn. Then Home Secretary Theresa May