Battling to keep Britain safe, Priti the new Iron Lady
NOW WE can see why the Labour Party and its Left- wing fellow travellers tried so very hard to get rid of Priti Patel. The Home Secretary has characteristically refused to buckle in the face of a Leftist onslaught designed to dismantle essential parts of this country’s immigration controls. Indeed, she has even had the audacity to embark on a counter- attack.
At stake is the right of the Home Office – and indeed its duty – to protect the public by deporting foreign criminals to their country of origin once they have served prison sentences. One such deportation flight, involving Jamaican nationals, went ahead this week despite last- minute legal challenges cutting the numbers removed by two- thirds.
The flight was a cause of outrage for many Labour MPs. Their complaint was not that it was insufficient and that many more overseas criminals should also be removed before they have the chance to perpetrate further crimes against constituents, but just the opposite.
SCORES of Labour MPs, backed by leading Liberal Democrats, decided that the deportations were an outrageous infringement of the rights of the criminals concerned, including killers, rapists and drug- dealers.
Labour even suggested that carrying out the expulsions would amount to a repeat of the Windrush scandal which involved many law- abiding immigrants from the Caribbean being wrongly threatened with deportation and in some cases actually removed from the UK.
To use that appalling injustice as grounds for seeking a de facto right for foreign criminals to stay in Britain is a flagrant insult to its victims.
But Labour MPs did just that when sending a letter to Ms Patel that claimed: “Planning a pre- Christmas mass deportation flight demonstrates that the Home Office has so far failed to learn any lessons… We must not see a repeat of the actions that led to members of the Windrush generation being so unjustly mistreated.” The letter also alleged that “institutionalised racism” was at work.
The letter followed a similarly fatuous missive supported by celebrities such as the model Naomi Campbell and the actress Thandie Newton, which cited “concern about systemic racism”. In a Commons debate on Monday, Labour MP after Labour MP spoke against the deportations. Diane Abbott even described some of the criminals involved as “vulnerable”, while fellow backbencher Kim Johnson said the move was “obscene and irresponsible”.
The good news is that while a less determined and gutsy Home Secretary might have buckled before this display of politically correct nonsense, Ms Patel is having none of it.
“The Windrush scandal is a stain on our country’s history. That generation made an enormous contribution to our country and were wronged by successive governments. To see ill- informed Labour politicians and do- gooding celebrities attempting to conflate the victims of Windrush with these vile criminals set for deportation is not only misjudged and upsetting but deeply offensive,” she later said.
And far from the deportation of foreign criminals being a policy that disproportionately hits black people, ministers have revealed that the majority of those removed over the last year have been European, with only 33 being Jamaicans.
AT THE heart of this dispute is a basic values divide. Labour under Keir Starmer, as much as Jeremy Corbyn before him, has turned its back on its patriotic origins and no longer acknowledges that protection of citizens is the first duty of the state.
Instead it has become fixated on the trendy notion of “global citizenship”, with many of its MPs wishing for a world without borders and no longer supporting the basic concept of the nation state.
Starmer himself has not uttered a word about this affair but has allowed frontbenchers such as his immigration spokeswoman Holly Lynch to allege parallels between the deportations and the Windrush scandal.
Meanwhile, Ms Patel has revealed she plans to bring in legislation in the new year to ban any foreign national convicted of rape or homicide from using the asylum system as a means of staying in Britain.
Some of the Jamaican criminals who got themselves off the plane back to Kingston this week via 11th hour appeals did so by lodging asylum claims, knowing that the ensuing legal process is likely to take many months.
With Labour so far removed from the common sense priorities of the electorate, we are fortunate to have the gutsy Ms Patel batting for Britain.
‘ Determined and gutsy Ms Patel won’t buckle to PC nonsense’