This government acts in the most profoundly cruel ways

The Windrush scandal shames this government and it shames this country. It is a common trope to say, somewhat euphemistically, that certain political events force us to “ask difficult questions”. However when it comes to Windrush - to lives ruined, families torn apart, to people left homeless in places they never called home - it is not a matter of questions. We have all the answers we could ever need, writ large in human misery: answers about institutional racism, about bureaucratic systems which have prejudiced, callous hearts, about how large a tragedy can grow unchecked in the Home Office and seemingly without anyone noticing.

And last week, with the takeoff of a deportation charter flight bound for Jamaica, we have another set of answers: answers about what this government really means when it says it is “sorry”. The “Lessons Learned” review into the Windrush scandal has, two years down the line, still not been published. While this review goes unseen and its findings unimplemented, as my Labour colleague Nadia Whittome MP pointed out in a letter to which I happily put my name, there can be no guarantee that we will not see more Windrush deportations. We have called for a halt on deportations pending this review, and I was pleased to see Prime Minister Boris Johnson being taken to task on deportations to the Caribbean at the last PMQS before Parliamentary recess. The Conservative government would wish to draw a line between deportation flights like the one we saw last week and the Windrush scandal, to say that the two are entirely unrelated. In truth, these are two sides of the same coin. At PMQS, Mr Corbyn referenced the Prime Minister’s own admission that he has taken class A drugs - the same kind of offence which has seen some who have been in the UK since infanthood landed on flights whose destinations might be thousands of miles away and entirely unfamiliar. The hypocrisy is staggering - which is it, front bencher Michael Gove admitting to taking cocaine or Home Secretary Priti Patel insisting there’s “no such thing as dabbling in drugs”? One thing is at least completely clear: this government has put in place and strengthened systems which perpetuate the idea that there are gradations of Britishness - that for the white and well to do it is a dead cert, but for others it is contingent on good behaviour or on government beneficence. The Prime Minister talks a lot about “unleashing Britain’s potential” and “taking back control”. Looking at the appointment of the former chair of the ERG, who is every inch the Brexiteer loyalist and who has a history of speaking out in favour of harsher immigration controls as our new Attorney General, the thing that most concerns me is the potential of this government to act and to keep acting in profoundly cruel ways.