Friday 14 May 2021

Immigration under the spotlight

Scottish independence took a giant leap forward yesterday in Kenmure Street, Glasgow when the local community came together to prevent two Indian immigrants being forcibly detained. Nowhere was the difference between Scotland’s attitude to immigration seen so starkly against some English communities where the men’s detention would probably have been applauded.  Scotland may even have woken up people in England to what creeping nationalism really means.

It was made worse that this took place on Eid, a religious holiday celebrated by Muslims to mark the end of the fasting of Ramadan, as well as during Covid-19 lockdown restrictions. It seems nothing must stand in the way of deporting two perfectly harmless individuals.

Hundreds of people took to the streets to stop Home Office officials removing the men in a van, men who had apparently lived in Glasgow for ten years, to a detention centre ready for deportation. The stand off lasted all day while Scottish police looked on but didn’t take sides.

Eventually, the Home Office must have realise there was no way the crowd was going to disperse and the two were freed:

The crowd at one point were chanting “They’re our neighbours, let them go.” It was quite emotional when the two emerged from the back of the van where they had been held for hours and, accompanied by the crowd, taken to the local mosque.

Scotland can be proud of itself.

I wonder if some Scots voters who might have been wavering about independence will have been persuaded that the fundamental values of England and Scotland have become so different that independence is the only answer, whatever the cost.  I think they might have been.

On the question of independence, I noted Professor Sir John Curtice gave short shrift to a Tory MP who tried to argue that the SNP had no mandate to hold a second referendum. The exchange is worth a minute to listen to him destroy the argument against indyref2:

He explains that it doesn't matter about the 2014 Scottish referendum now because Brexit has "fundamentally" changed the argument and it has weakened the union, no matter how often the Tory party tries to argue that it hasn't.

All of this came on the same day The Guardian published a long read about the UK's current immigration policy and in which a young Italian woman was held in prison for seven days for trying to enter the U.K. without a visa. It really shames us all. 

The story of the Italian graduate aged 24 appeared in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. She was imprisoned for 7 days because she tried to enter the UK to look for work as an au pair.  This is just shocking, the kind of thing you expect from Iran or North Korea.  It really is awful.

The Guardian's long read concerns The Home Office and how something is badly wrong at the heart of one of Britain’s most important ministries. Daniel Tilling asks how did it become so broken?

One story is about a young businessman from Bangladesh accused of cheating on an English language who was baffled to be arrested. He had  lived in the UK for nearly a decade, he had a degree from an English university, and spoke English fluently. Why would he cheat?  But no, he had to be arrested.

This hasn't just happened under Patel although she has enthusiastically made it worse. Home Secretaries, instead of explaining that immigration was a good thing, opened the gates to more immigration, failed to build enough houses and all the time created a hostile environment against migrants to placate the hard right.

We seem to have completely lost our way.

Dacian Ciolos President of the Renew Europe Group in the European Parliament, has now written to Von der Leyen to complain that EU nationals are not being accorded the rights as set out in the WA agreement and specifically raising the question of EU nationals being detained for minor border infringements as if they're criminals.

In similar cases in Europe, the people are simply returned to the UK the same day, often on the plane they arrived on. They aren't imprisoned.  Ciolos asks what would we think if the EU did the same to UK nationals. Imagine The Daily Mail headlines!

We seem incapable of using common sense.  If there is a country in Europe that needs to be in the EU it's the UK. We have lost the ability to govern ourselves.

It would indeed be a turn up if the ordinary residents of a street in Glasgow did something to shake the nation out of its torpor.


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