Copyright scotsman
Do you ever have that feeling when you see something utterly mad, but everyone else is acting as though it is entirely ordinary? If you are not careful you can find yourself thinking that perhaps you are the crazy one, and normalising something that should not be treated as normal. That is the feeling I have had this week as frontbench Conservative MP Katie Lam has pushed a plan for mass deportations, not of “illegal” migrants but of hundreds of thousands of entirely legal, longstanding residents of our country. Tory leadership and right-leaning media have nodded along to this madcap proposal, which would have been considered beyond the pale just months ago, while Labour have barely uttered a squeak in response. This Tory mass deportation policy shows just how extreme our politics risks becoming. No matter how mad these proposals may appear, we must take them seriously – and take them on directly. The Conservative plan would mean deporting long-standing legal permanent residents if they have ever claimed any government benefit, including the state pension, statutory maternity pay or child benefit – even if the child is British – or if they earn less than £38,700 for any six-month period. There are no exceptions made for the spouses of British citizens or the parents of British children. No exceptions for critical workers in health or social care. No exceptions for pensioners in their 80s who have lived all their lives in this country – we shall dig them out of their care homes if we must. These proposals would mean a greater scale of mass deportation than the expulsion of Ugandan Asians in the 1970s by noted humanitarian Idi Amin. That is the Conservative Party policy. There is a tendency amongst pundits to explain away these madcap announcements as just another part of the game of politics. The implication is that the madness and cruelty of a proposal do not matter because it will (probably) never happen. It’s not about what the facts of the policy are – it is just about Conservatives (and on occasion, Labour) trying to compete with the Reform Party on far-right political posturing. That trivialisation of politics, acting as though rhetoric need have no connection to reality, already drives contempt for our political system. If it were ever acceptable, however, it surely runs out of road when you throw hundreds of thousands of human lives into the balance. We cannot treat this as another part of the political game. We have the right to hold Katie Lam and the Conservatives to account for their plan. It is not good enough to let them obfuscate and deny the obvious consequences of what they propose. When the draft bill that underpins this Tory policy was released, the party said that this was “serious, credible immigration policy” that proved the Conservatives were “ready to govern”. We must respond accordingly. Even to consider the mass deportation of legal residents of this country was once seen as completely beyond the pale. It is on all of us to stop this becoming our new normal. If we do not call out madcap ideas for what they are, we will all be in the madhouse before too long. William Deans is Chief of Staff to Alistair Carmichael MP, and holds an MSc in Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict
