Rudd’s resignation reminds us that control of immigration matters to the public

So another piece of political theatre comes to its denouement with the resignation of the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd.

Conservative Home Office scandals are as predictable as pantomimes and come with their own time-honoured tropes, including cruel, heartless and usually racist Tories and their selfless Labour opponents championing the underdog. Behind the scenes the reality is rather different.

The underlying driver of the Home Office’s enduring difficulties is that the views of our political, media and judicial establishments on crime and immigration are fundamen- tally at odds with those of the majority of the British people. The public want firm but fair control of immigration. In the case of the Windrush scandal, we expect a speedy and fair resolution for people who have long integrated into British life, whether they are technically citizens or not.

The Conservatives periodically promise to get tough on immigration and produce measures to give the impression of doing so. However, as their hearts are not in it, they never apply their minds to obviating the legal and judicial impediments to this result.

For the Labour party, immigration is a licence to slander the Conservatives and protect their market share of ethnic minority voters. Their electoral self-interest is in perfect harmony with their ideological opposition to nations and national borders.

It is time that all elements of the establishment grasped that control of immigration – the issue which determined the result of the Brexit referendum – really matters to the British public.

OTTO INGLIS Inveralmond Grove, Edinburgh

Is Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable’s view on race, immigration and the attitude of successive governments and the political class valid (your report, 30 April)? I think he has struck the wrong note, not for the first time confusing those who want to see civilised control on the numbers entering the United Kingdom and ‘’bigots’’. The lesson of the Windrush controversy, the resignation of Home Secretary Amber Rudd, is not that the public has been alerted to a terrible injustice and is tired of any form of harsh control.

It must surely be that the public want to see effective immigration control tempered by justice. It is also that they want to see the Home Office – politicians and officials – communicate effectively with one another and at least know the central problem they are meant to be dealing with.

There is nothing wrong with vigilance in an attempt to control those who enter the country illegally. This problem is often compounded by the sophistication, if that is the right word, of criminal gangs intent on a quick profit, intimidation and exploitation of the vulnerable. There is plenty wrong with the combination of callousness and incompetence at official level that allowed some of the Windrush generation to be treated with such disdain.

But Sir Vince is mistaken if he thinks the root of the problem is that politicians have come to think of the wider population as race conscious or bigoted.

Distinguished senior statesmen and women such as the late Denis Healey and Barbara Castle have stressed the need to listen if constituents bring to them problems on housing, benefits, transport and too speedy a rate of change in their communities. They are not narrow or bigoted for doing so. They may be simply passing judgement that resources, population and needs must be balanced correctly and that they may be losing out because they are not.

BOB TAYLOR Shiel Court, Glenrothes