Rudd’s cause collapsed when her department put policy before people
The biggest political casualty of the Windrush shambles is Amber Rudd. Friends and foes alike are asking how it got to this. The Home Secretary, a standard bearer for pro-European, liberal Tories, was tipped as a successor to Theresa May, but now she is tarnished by a scandal that makes her department appear not only incompetent but unjust and divisive.
Yet the buck doesn’t stop with the current Home Secretary which, combined with doubts over the Brexit talks, is why a dejected Tory party is now back in turmoil this weekend.
The Home Office has only been run by two people for the last eight years: Ms Rudd and the current Prime Minister. Ms Rudd’s own ambitions were built on not only serving Mrs May but emulating her and her policies.
Even before Windrush, no side was happy with that agenda. Labour complains that Ms Rudd and Mrs May talk in an inflammatory way about crime while cutting police budgets. Their Tory critics say they have been tough in some regards while wet in others – that they have sustained the ethos of the New Labour era, with its mix of draconian invasions of privacy and right-on liberalism while actually losing control of crime.
On the one hand, Mrs May as home secretary did her best to get foreignborn criminals deported, banned extremist speakers and opted in to the European Arrest Warrant – all with controversial implications for civil liberties, the latter particularly upsetting Eurosceptics.
As Jacob Rees-Mogg tells this newspaper: “We’re not the sort of country that demands to see your papers but I’m afraid the proEuropeans think we should be.”
On the other hand, Mrs May cut stop-and-search, a policy which Boris Johnson blamed for the rise in knife attacks in the capital in an interview with The Daily Telegraph last week.
Backbench Tories believe that police priorities have been distorted, with undue emphasis upon public relations and social liberalism.
This culminated in Operation Midland, the farcical investigation into sexual abuse by politicians which produced no convictions, cost £2.5million and tarnished reputations. But it is immigration that is at the heart of this troubled May/Rudd legacy. The Prime Minister stuck with a “net migration” target that almost nobody in her party agrees with.
Rudd, despite private doubts, has also endorsed it, unwilling or unable to defy a weakened May, even after the general election.
The target’s lack of achievability forced the Home Office to focus on illegal immigration with one of the few tools available: creating an environment so hostile (through checks and threats of deportation) that people give up and leave, AKA the Immigration Acts of 2014 and 2016.
For some reason, the department failed to foresee that not everyone who is a perfectly legal citizen has the paperwork to prove they belong here.
That’s why some Windrush Britons, who were given permission to stay decades ago but never obtained ID, have found themselves caught in the Government’s war on illegal aliens. Labour MPs say this row is the cost of Mrs May’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.
In reality, it wasn’t down to malice but ham-fisted bureaucracy in pursuit of a political agenda, which Ms Rudd conceded when she told the House of Commons that her department has, for too long, put policy before people.
Even Ms Rudd’s allies are said to be disappointed with the Home Secretary. If she is an instinctive liberal, they ask, why didn’t she break with the Prime Minister earlier?
Tory backbenchers, meanwhile, want to know when the Government will actually start formulating a post-Brexit “controlled immigration” policy and reverse the tide of political correctness in policing.
Both sides have been furious about Windrush, a row with racial implications on the eve of local elections in which Jeremy Corbyn, despite being accused of anti-Semitism, is expected to sweep London.
This story has contradicted the spirit of the post-Brexit Global Britain project and raises the question of how well the UK will handle the status of EU citizens in the next few years.
It’s been a disastrous week for Ms Rudd, Mrs May and the Home Office establishment.
‘The department failed to foresee that not everyone who is a perfectly legal citizen has the paperwork’