Rudd’s exit must not undo government policy

Following the Windrush debacle, Amber Rudd has thrown in the towel. Given the panic following such a last-minute decision, the Government may be tempted in the Commons today to abase itself before the lobby which opposes all immigration controls. If it does that, it will undermine one of its own central policies.

I am interested by the attitude of anti-mass immigration research group Migration Watch UK on all this. Rather than jumping in head first, it takes the line that the case of the “Windrush generation” is not about immigration, but about natural justice and administrative incompetence. This is true. The Windrush generation, being lifelong British citizens, are not immigrants within the meaning of the act. For officials to chase them, therefore, is unjust and time-wasting.

It does not follow that the Government should try to go soft on illegal immigration. You might as well say that because HMRC bungles some investigations and arrests decent people who have been paying their taxes all along, the collection of taxes should now cease.

What most people want – which was made infinitely more difficult by the Blair government’s decision to throw wide the doors to immigrants in 1998 – is to know who is coming into this country. In the light of that knowledge, their flow can be controlled. The policy is impossible to get right in every case, but to have no such policy is to ensure social breakdown.

This desire for legal control was important in the Brexit vote, because it is a subset of the wider belief that we are entitled to self-government. If the Government chucks this away today, the lights will change from Amber to red.

“Bank of England and ECB to assess risks of no-deal Brexit”, said a newspaper headline on Saturday. Two questions occur. First, why had these august institutions not done this before? Given the fact of the Brexit vote on one side and the intransigence of Brussels on the other, a “no-deal” Brexit has been a serious possibility from the start. It’s a bit late to consider it only now.

Second, as well as the “risks”, how about the Bank of England assessing the advantages? One of the most important steps which Britain took to achieve global economic dominance was the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. We made a decision to live by free trade. By voting Leave 170 years later – almost to the day – we put ourselves back on that liberal path. “No-deal” is the real deal.

Hardly any story about anything is complete these days without someone complaining that he or she has been insulted or threatened online for his views or actions. It is, indeed, disgusting. But it is also a useful reminder of how nasty a significant minority of the human race can be.

And, in some cases, how unprofessional. It is fascinating to me that some people who work in the public services, and therefore have a duty of neutrality, cannot resist telling their personal views to the world on social media. They reveal prejudices which always existed, but in the old days were usually hidden from view.

Take the case of a police officer, Sgt Matt Scott, who led an investigation into an alleged breach of the Hunting Act by the Grove and Rufford Hunt. The hunt’s conviction was recently overturned on appeal after it was discovered that the court had not been shown sections of film which clearly showed the accused hunt members trying to prevent hounds from hunting a fox (though the CPS insists this was not why it dropped its opposition to the appeal).

Then it was said in court that a Twitter account in Sgt Scott’s name had tweeted, using numerous expletives, against people involved in field sports. The tweets described the magazine Shooting Times as being “a Right-wing publication written by six-fingered harrier killing cousin f-----”, and insulted Princes William and Harry for going hunting.

Sgt Scott might have kept his apparently biased views quiet for years if only he had not itched to tell a wider world about it. By tweeting, he showed himself to be not only a fanatic, but a twit.

I refuse to take sides in the battle (see these pages on Saturday) between JK Rowling and my colleague Christopher Hope. As someone who is in favour of Brexit and of owls,

I do not see why there cannot be commemorative stamps for both of them.

Instead, I should like to commend another of Ms Rowling’s interventions – her recent contribution to the anti-semitism debate. Noticing how it seems to be mainly Jews who rebut anti-semitic remarks online, she says that “maybe some of us non-jews should start shouldering the burden”.

She is right. It is a statement of the obvious that Jews are the people most insulted and most threatened by anti-semitic speech, but if we leave it to Jews alone to handle it, we perpetrate two wrongs.

The first is the simple failure to help friends and neighbours in distress. The second is to accept, by our silence, one of the deepest anti-semitic insinuations. This is that Jews are a problem and if only they would all go away we would no longer have any trouble. Once you think they are a problem, you start to think of a “solution”. Once you have exhausted all the others, you end up with a “solution” which you call “final”.