The Windrush scandal is no accident – it is Tory policy working as intended | Suzanne Moore

Forget bureaucratic ineptitude. The Tories are convinced they have the consent of the people to enact inhumane policies

On their deathbed, who would want to look back and say: “I am proud of creating a hostile environment for immigrants so that some people who had lived in Britain all their lives were deported to countries they had never been to”? Who wants to take responsibility for the heartbreaking stories we have been hearing?

The closest I have heard to anyone being honest about this mess is Baroness Warsi, a former Conservative party chair. “I think we were all responsible,” she said. “I would hold myself responsible as part of the government.” She went on to describe a government obsessed with unrealistic targets. The ruining of lives, the tearing apart of families, is not the result of bureaucratic ineptitude. This is policy working as intended. The collateral damage of the 2014 Immigration Act is the rupturing of lives of those we can deem, retrospectively, not “one of us”. The idea that a person can be born here or arrive as a child, raise a family and pay taxes, but still somehow be seen as completely “foreign” comes as a jolt.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2FabwkQ