When Priti Patel was appointed home secretary, innumerable Britons were scandalized. She’d been sacked by Theresa May for breaking rules of office. She’d been overpromoted just because she was an implacable slash-and-burn Brexiter. Critics queried her intellectual capacities and political judgments. She was lampooned by cartoonists and comedians. Some reactions were racist or misogynist or both; most were entirely right and proper.
I was besieged by Ugandan Asian Patel groupies and beseeched to back her. My response was this tweet: ‘Defend her, they say, she’s one of us, a Ugandan Asian. Go hang your head in shame, say I. For she’s one of the- a right-wing fanatic and appalling human being’. It was retweeted by a sizable crowd and caused a global stir. That was before Britain was struck by the corona virus. This week her grotesque immigration bill passes through parliament and I feel vindicated. She is both an anti-immigrant zealot and a pinhead. She boasts ‘We are ending free movement to open Britain up to the world’. (A Private Eye cover line shurely. )
Under the new system, tax dodging squillionaires are most welcome, so too, high-tech high earning clones of Dominic Cummings, and, the ‘skilled’ – a new brahmin class. (Any doctor called Nicolas will, presumably be free to enter, because two Dr Nicks saved the PM.) The untouchables are cleaners, carers, deliverers, fruit and veg pickers, manual workers, auxiliary nurses, supermarket staff, all those who have saved our lives by risking theirs over these dreadful weeks. EU citizens, settled here, who have contributed enormously to the exchequer, are outcasts too. Under the new regulations, those wanting to migrate to the UK must be sponsored by an employer and earn over £25,600. Priti Patel’s own family, exiles from Uganda, like me, would not be able to get into Britain today.
The acrid dish is served up, garnished with the usual, tawdry duplicities: ‘The current crisis has shone a light on how we value those who provide compassionate care across health and social care…It will end free movement and pave the way for a firmer, fairer and simpler system and will attract people we need to drive our country through the recovery stage of coronavirus, laying the foundation of a high wage, high skill productive economy’ I’m heaving. Are you?
Here’s more nauseating info. Non-British NHS and care workers who have toiled day and night to care for the vulnerable, have to pay over £625 per person to get medical treatment. As do others who have been indispensable to this nation. Newspapers report that Taitusi Ratucaucau, who served years in the British army, including tours of Afghanistan and Iraq, is being charged more than £27,000 for an emergency operation to remove a brain tumour. He has a wife and three daughters. A Filipino nurse tells me she is not taking her epileptic child to hospital because she is afraid of the cost. The family of a dead, Ghanaian care worker, again, are intensely worried. Her husband told me on the phone: ‘She’s gone. I cry, am afraid. I can’t pay if I get sick or my child’.
As we know, the Covid-19 death rate for black and Asian people is more than twice that for white Britons. Many have perished because they worked on the frontlines without proper protection. The state and managers failed them disastrously. Those left behind have to cope with the loss and economic hardships. Instead of gratitude and sympathy, right wingers become punitive and vindictive. David Green, director of Civitas, a think tank favoured by Gove and others, opined in the Daily Telegraph that Bame Covid data was being twisted to further the antiracist ‘victimhood’ agenda’. Not one minister has condemned these slurs and despicable callousness.
Recent social research indicates that public opinion on immigrants is shifting since the Corona breakout. In one survey, a large majority (77%) agreed that EU nationals working as doctors and nurses during the coronavirus crisis should be offered automatic British citizenship and a good majority (62%) also backed offering automatic British citizenship to other essential workers. (https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/the-corona-crisis-has-made-us-value-migrants-heres-how-to-build-on-that/ ) Patel’s wing of the Tory party picks this moment to degrade those who came from elsewhere and have served the nation beyond the call of duty. And to smash up the common ties that now bind diverse UK inhabitants.
Clapping on Thursdays just became meaningless, grubby even. Don’t clap. Shout and scream, name and shame Patel, a progeny of immigrants, and one of the most malevolent home secretaries in recent history.
I newspaper 20th May 2020