ToryXenophobia

Quora Answer : What do you think of Jeremy Corbyn saying that stopping freedom of movement after 31 October in case of no-deal Brexit could end in a situation like the “Windrush on steroids”?

Aug 20, 2019

I think he's right.

The issue of Windrush is not just that the UK state fucked up and hurt a lot of people unnecessarily.

It's that the UK state fucked up and hurt a lot of people unnecessarily because the state had been deliberately turned into an instrument for persecuting innocent people because subtle xenophobic / racist intuitions were turned into active policies by a Home Secretary (at that time, Theresa May), for political reasons.

May has always trended a bit Little Englander xenophobic. And so she found that making her Home Office seem extra tough on illegal immigrants was both politically expedient (Cameron was talking about getting immigration numbers down, playing to the xenophobic vote) and suited her temperament. Having put lots of extra rules in place that basically made "foreign looking" people guilty of being "illegal" unless they could prove themselves innocent, the scene was set for the Windrush scandal.

Priti Patel is repeating the same pattern. As a hard right-winger in the government, and as a person of colour herself, she is both inclined to be tough on foreigners and may even think she has more to prove to the xenophobic constituency she courts. And she's part of Boris's ridiculous project to "pressurize" the EU into giving the UK cake.

So, like May, she is ramping up the Home Office's institutional mission to punish foreigners for the presumption of being foreign while trying to make their home in the UK. Whereas Windrush largely hurt legitimate Britons who happened to have Caribbean origins, she's now going to hurt legitimate Britons who have any kind of rest-of-Europe origins. Plus all the actual rest-of-Europeans who have been contributing to this ungrateful country for a significant proportion of their lives.