The Government has eroded British values just when we need them most

Mrs May can only take back control of immigration if she sticks to principles of justice and fairness

Often, when there is a great public to-do about some scandal, it is a bit of a fuss about nothing. With the “Windrush generation” story, I feel it is actually worse than people have been saying. It calls into question the thing we talk about so much nowadays: “British values”.

To see this, it is important to understand that the Windrush generation have always been British citizens. It was, I think, a mistake of the Attlee government to grant British citizenship to colonial peoples, but it happened. It was on that basis that they boarded the Windrush, and subsequent boats, and came here.

No one told them they must have papers. Decades later, as immigration law changed, many of them found themselves being harassed by Home Office officials to prove their birthright. If they could not, they were told, they would have to go back “home”. Yet their home, by law, and probably, in most cases, by sentiment, was Britain.

They were ill-treated in this way because they were black. I do not mean that officials felt racist animosity. But the train of thought was something like “Lots of blacks around with excuses for not having papers; we’re under orders to catch the illegals: let’s clamp down on anyone we can get”. I don’t believe they would have tried it on with white Australians.

So British citizens who were not, in a legal sense, immigrants, let alone illegal immigrants, were treated like criminal aliens. To bring it home in my own mind, I imagine it happening to my mother. She is white and English, but was born in Malta because her father was in the RAF. If she had been black and born in Jamaica, might she have been dragged along for interrogation to help hit Home Office targets?

As well as the cruelty involved, another British value has been transgressed – the idea that you are innocent until proved guilty. In whole swathes of British life now, this key presumption of justice is being cast aside. It happens with sexual harassment accusations, child abuse allegations, tax demands. The burden of proof is reversed, with dire consequences for the person accused. Theresa May allowed it to happen in the case of her right-hand man, Damian Green, who fell from office not because he was guilty of touching a woman’s knee and downloading pornography on his parliamentary computer (we still don’t know the facts), but because he was accused of these things.

In the Windrush cases, people’s presumed guilt threatened to take away their Britishness itself. That is the antithesis of British values. It makes one suspect – especially if one belongs to an ethnic minority – that our officialdom is not only incompetent, but really not very nice. If official culture cannot see the difference between enforcement and persecution, we are all in trouble.

Until now, I have always opposed identity cards, on the grounds that their insistence on proof of identity is itself un-british. But if our authorities are going to run round forcing people to defend themselves against accusations they hurl at them, perhaps the revival of interest in ID cards is justified. If every British person had to have one, at least we would all be on the same footing.

With each passing day, the Windrush scandal raises more clearly the question of leadership. The Home Office deserves some sympathy because of the scale of the problems with which it has to deal. Every year, about 100 million people pass through British airports, of whom roughly 45 per cent are non-british. The potential for error is huge. All the more need, then, for a Cabinet minister who understands the complexities, and can give a moral and policy lead.

Amber Rudd has not so far done either. At first, she blamed officials. Bafflingly, she then asserted to the parliamentary committee that the Home Office did not have numerical immigration removal targets, and then had to back down the next day when she discovered the easily ascertainable information that it did. Now a newly discovered memo shows that she was informed of targets last year.

After Brexit, immigration is probably the most controversial subject in politics today. Why does the minister in charge of it not know what is happening? Ms Rudd is an able, decent person, but she seems to have got herself into the tricky position of presiding over a policy she does not much like.

Ministers who do this often succumb to the temptation of distancing themselves from the policy – I think, for example, of Norman Lamont, as chancellor of the Exchequer in 1992, privately denouncing the ERM whose membership it was his job to defend. Such semi-detachment wins them the applause of sympathisers, but makes them do their job badly. Ms Rudd has stayed popular with educated, urban, pro-immigration Remainers, but at the cost of not gripping her department. Perhaps it suited her political positioning to leave others to get on with its dirty work.

That dirty work, she subtly implies, has nothing to do with her. In the Commons on Thursday, Sir Nicholas Soames rose to defend Ms Rudd by pointing out that she was dealing with “a very difficult legacy issue”. He meant, but did not say, that the legacy issue is Mrs May.

Whatever else may be said about Mrs May’s time at the Home Office, gripping it was certainly something she did. The trouble was that this process was largely self-defensive and uncreative. Instead of addressing the whole subject of immigration – which would, for example, have led her to focus on the damage done by EU free movement – she obsessed about net figures. These are almost arbitrary, partly because they rely on numbers leaving as well as numbers coming. The fierceness of the attack on the Windrush generation may have been displacement activity because the EU immigration problem was off-limits.

It was not unreasonable of Mrs May to create a “hostile environment for illegal immigration” (that key word “illegal” is usually left out by her critics), but the phrase sticks, because it fits her style of politics so well. Her environment is hostile to talented individuals who pose a threat to her, to courses of action that are bold, and above all to ideas that are new and interesting. She is hostile, in her rhetoric, to freedom, opportunity, markets, businessmen, immigrants. It was she, many years ago, who was the first prominent Conservative to call her party “nasty” (she is hostile even to her own). Yet no one could accuse her, as its leader, of having made it nicer.

We do not know exactly when the Windrush problem was brought to Mrs May’s notice, but we do know that the government of Barbados raised it with the Foreign Office as long ago as 2016. It would be remarkable if Downing Street knew nothing until the day before she made a public apology for it less than a fortnight ago. More will surely come out.

It is not surprising that people are calling for Ms Rudd’s resignation, but if she did resign, she would leave Mrs May exposed. The Remainer faction might grow weaker in the Cabinet, but it would become stronger as a public force. Meanwhile, opponents of Brexit are using the Windrush debacle as a way of dismissing all immigration policy. Just as the time approaches when we can take back control, the controllers have allowed themselves to be morally discredited.