Tory hostile environment doesn’t end with migrants
“THE aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants.”
These were the words of then Home Secretary Theresa May in 2012, two years after a raft of measures came into effect, designed to make staying in the UK as difficult as possible for illegal immigrants.
The belief underpinning it being that if the Government could just make people anxious, miserable and frightened enough then maybe they would leave voluntarily.
It later transpired the Government were hounding citizens with a legal right to be here who were part of the Windrush generation – people who came here by invitation from the Caribbean from 1948 onwards.
As the “hostile environment” policy was rolled out, they found themselves on the receiving end of a government onslaught of calculated and vicious harassment.
The Windrush scandal continues to make headlines but sadly, this borderline-religious commitment to the politics of deliberate hostility is not confined to the Home Office.
It stretches its toxic tentacles into every area of public life. From education, welfare and the labour market, to housing, criminal justice and even mental health services, the pattern is repeated.
Rather than address the fundamental issues of austerity, wealth-polarisation and a democracy that prioritises the needs of the super-wealthy over everything else, Conservative ministers would rather design policy around the angry guess-work of Daily Mail readers.
I suppose it’s politically easier to get tough on vulnerable and disenfranchised groups like immigrants and the homeless than it is to look an electorally valuable section of the UK public in the eye and say, “you’re wrong.”
In an age of permanent austerity, empathy is in short supply. Some people need scapegoats.
For many, simply the illusion that something is being done is enough. This political cover allows the Tories to advance their socially harmful agenda unchallenged.
An agenda rooted in a belief that people already living in conditions of stress and adversity will do something other than buckle when confronted by an onslaught of a calculated hostility. Before the Windrush scandal became public knowledge, many people had already lost their jobs, were denied health care and had their bank accounts frozen.
That unforgiving and painful policy lines up with what’s being done in other areas of public life.
Take the current culture of welfare conditionality where harsh sanctions – designed to incentivise people into work – are not only driving foodbank use and homelessness but creating more financial costs further down the line.
Then there’s the now infamous rape clause, where women are granted exemption from the twochild cap on tax credits if they can prove a third child was conceived through sexual assault.
From the treatment of immigrants with a legal right to be here, to faceless DWP mercenaries, encouraged by generous bonus packages to treat the unemployed, sick and disabled as suspects in a criminal trial, it’s clear the current UK Government are either extremely callous or dangerously stupid.
Sadly, this represents the tip of a very large iceberg. The “hostile environment” policy is not just an impulsive, reactionary and superficial manifesto gimmick designed to appease an angry and politically valuable section of the English electorate. It’s a nightmarish vision of a United Kingdom under permanent Tory rule.