UK immigration crisis

I don’t think it can be considered even mildly controversial to assert that the British government today is the most monumentally incompetent since the 18th century.  Mean-minded, inflexible, incurious, contradictory, unethical, kneejerk reflexive, uncoordinated, arrogant....  Never use more than seven adjectives.  There are plenty of examples verifying this truth in all spheres from Brexit (whichever side you’re on) to climate change to defence policy. 

Here of course I speak of the current lash up on immigration.  Briefly, for faraway readers, Theresa May when in the Home Office stated she wanted to create a “hostile environment” for overstaying illegal immigrants and set targets for packing them off back where they came from.  Amber Rudd, who replaced her, was a liberal soul but she determined to toe the party line and like most liberals trying to act tough she got it all wrong.  A scandal erupted when the capricious “public”, who for so long were thought to be rabidly anti-immigrant, switched to acting scandalised when, in particular, Caribbean immigrants brought over in the 1950s, believing implicitly in the British Commonwealth of Nations, to fill jobs Britons couldn’t bear to do, now solid citizens, were being sent home because their paperwork wasn’t perfect.  The government, having, employing the cunningest of records managers, recently destroyed the best evidence of who went where when – their landing cards.  Poor Amber denied knowing about targets.  Leaks showed she did know.  She resigned.

A coincidence, of relevance to Zimbabwean immigrants: Amber Rudd is distantly related to the lawyer after whom the Rudd Concession is named – which will mean something only to old Rhodesians.

But the unkind treatment of immigrants is nothing new.  Choose your own example.  Mine is: in the 19th century my grandparents and great-uncles and great-aunts, dutifully following the injunctions of the government, which had lashed up agricultural policy resulting in rural poverty and unemployment, went forth bravely to populate Empire, and some turned up in Rhodesia.  The British government gave Responsible Government to white Rhodesians with minimal protection for blacks.  Then the British government mishandled the clamour for independence that bubbled up in the 1950s and 1960s.  Rhodesia collapsed slowly into war.  The Rhodesian government declared unilateral independence.  And from this point it was I who was not welcome in Britain, despite the fact that I had opposed the Rhodesian outlaw government....   It’s a long, tedious story.  But at least we know that the British Government is ever expedient and ever nasty to whites as well as to blacks.