1/ I’ve been thinking and writing about the hostile environment for ages but there’s something about it I’ve only recently come to realise. Shortish thread.
2/ I wrote my first big piece trying to explain how radical and wide ranging the policy was in 2017, many months before the Windrush scandal was exposed. freemovement.org.uk/hostile-enviro…
3. It took a really good journalist like @ameliagentleman to investigate and expose what was going on by shining a light on the real human impact. And there was consummate timing involved, with the Commonwealth summit.
4. I did a quick thread one morning while getting the children ready for school where I tried to contextualise the individual stories. It was picked up by a lot of media outlets and seemed to expand the story and the narrative.
5. I re-did my big briefing to explain it all better. But even then the penny still had not dropped. I assumed the purpose of the hostile environment was a rational albeit unpleasant one: to force unauthorised migrant to leave the UK. freemovement.org.uk/briefing-what-…
6. The reality is that the only real purpose to the hostile environment was to ensure unauthorised migrants did not have access to services and would be destitute. It was a moral purpose. Re-read Theresa May’s original announcement in 2012: nothing about forcing people to leave.
7. See also Nick Timothy’s various pronouncements. Even now, he doesn’t see what all the fuss is about. Because the policy did what it was supposed to do.
8. Officials and politicians rationalised the policy after the event. But there was no evidence it would “work” (to force people out or deter people coming) and that was never really the point. Even now, no research has been commissioned into its effectiveness in these terms.
9. The architects of the hostile environment policy also reduced the number of enforced removals (now at lowest level since 2004), removed routes to regularisation and stopped the periodic partial amnesties. They must have known the predictable effects of doing this.
10. This is one of the major themes of my book, Welcome to Britain. Although even then I was still assuming there was a rational policy objective behind the policy. amzn.to/2EX8RRp
11. They created a large unauthorised population (estimates go as high as 1.2m) of mainly ethnic minority people who live in poverty and are highly vulnerable to exploitation. Why? I don’t know. But they must surely have known what would happen. It was therefore deliberate. //
