Thread by @ZoeJardiniere

Priti Patel will be announcing some re-hashed and possibly some new immigration policies today at an event by @BrightblueGB, nominally the progressive think tank of the Tory party.

I'll be tweeting my thoughts & some context if I can on this thread 👀👇
independent.co.uk/news/uk/politi…

Patel will be once again claiming overwhelming public support for her anti-migrant and anti-refugee agenda, despite extremely limited evidence of anything of the kind.

Immigration is not a top concern in the country any more, but by God she's sure trying to change that.

Thanks to those who pointed out I in fact did mean @WeAreBrightBlue who are running the event alongside @britishfuture and who have put on a very interesting-looking couple of panels to follow on from the Home Secretary's speech discussing the challenges her policies provoke.

My bet, given this is a speech organised by thinktanks promoting "liberal conservatism" and integration issues, is that she's going to dress her speech very much in false clothes of compassion and forward-looking, streamlined services. They are anything but.

Alright 'ere we go.
Judging by written statement she has just put up, this is indeed going to be a re-hash of previously announced policies.
The govt's way of squeezing 6-7 days of immigration headlines out of every policy: re-announce at regular intervals questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-statem…

Broadly I think there are 4 things here:
1. the nasty new rules for refugees
2. the Points-Based System with fast-tracks for the 1%
3. digital border systems - risk of discrimination
4. digital immigration status - nightmare zone digitised Hostile Environment

Yup. As expected, she opens up by saying that people have never been heard on immigration. No democratic oversight of immigration in this country at all. nope. Never had a public reckoning on immigration, she's right, I've never even heard of immigration before.

Ah she wants to do some myth busting....

Oh no. The myths she's busting is the idea she's anti-immigration. No, don't worry Patel, we don't call you that. We call you anti-immigrant. Because your policies make that abundantly clear.

LOL "the first thing we have done is to restore public confidence in our immigration system"

Excuse me, have you seen the polls on trust in your department? What a joke. People have absolutely no faith in her or her department.

After 11 years in charge this government decries chaos in the asylum system. Thanks for catching up with the rest of us.
Every single expert including @UNHCRUK says you're ignoring the actual serious problems in the department and instead introducing more bureaucracy & delays.

Patel talking about her business partners, the smuggling gangs who rely on her failed, but ever more securitised borders to make their profits from desperate people seeking to come and build lives in safety in the UK theguardian.com/global-develop…

She's conflating so many different strands of bullshit here that it's genuinely hard to follow and comment.

From refugees trying to enter the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in Morocco, to foreign national offenders here in the UK.. it's a mess.

Now she's on to the folks in Glasgow, equating those who stopped the deportation of their neighbours with supporting criminality. No evidence whatsoever that I've seen suggests those two men were in any way involved in crime. But who knows, it makes a great bogeyman.

She says she's listening to the people of this country but she sure ain't listening very hard to Glasgow.

It's pretty incoherent overall. She's trying to frame it as open & compassionate system, but can't resist going in hard-line on repressing protest, equating migrants with criminality, throwing in her buzz-words of drugs and weapons and murder seemingly at random.
It doesn't work.

Oh we're onto the India deal. Giving an opportunity to "thousands" to live here legally, yeah. 3 thousand🤦‍♀️😅
3 thousand who can live here for 2 years and then be gone with no right to extend their stay or settle permanently and build lives here. What could go wrong?

I'm sure most migrants living in this country would do a double take at the idea that the system is seamless, or could ever be under these rules.

Their new plans to digitise systems for entry clearance are sinister in the context of repeated failures in Home Office digital systems, from massive data breaches, system failures and racist algorithms.
There can be no trust that this new digital system will be any different.

(Pretty amazing that British Future has just hosted a party political broadcast for the Tory party. With comments disabled and questions pre-vetted. Not necessarily their finest moment.)

Questions for the Home Sec on the EU Settled Status scheme, she's "very very clear" that it has been a huge success.
The deadline is approaching on 30 June, after which tens or potentially hundreds of thousands of EU citizens are going to lose their status & become undocumented.

She's asked whether events in Glasgow contradict her assertion that all communities in the UK support her anti-migrant agenda.

Well of course her answer has absolutely nothing to do with the question. This is a fundamental challenge to her narrative & she has nothing to say.

Asked about numbers, again we get word salad. As soon as she's not scripted it's terrifying how garbled she becomes, she makes 0 sense at all.

She loves to talk about skilling up our domestic work force, I don't understand. Does she think at some point we'll have such a "high skill economy" that we wont need anyone to serve coffee, pick fruit or care for our elders?
What is to her "low skilled" work will always be here.

Whether carried out by British people or immigrants, the need for those jobs isn't going away and her party has absolutely no plan for how to sustainably plan for that.

So she completely dodges the question on numbers of asylum seekers - which dropped this year but have otherwise stayed stable and low for over a decade - instead diverting the question to more comfortable ground for her on small boats crossings.

Another attempt to co-opt the language of safe routes to asylum, but even by her standards this is weak throw away "we are working on developing plans for safe routes"

We have plans ready, Priti, why not take a look? jcwi.org.uk/a-safe-and-leg…

I'd better get on with life now, so i'll leave it here.

She hasn't got any answers to the real problems. She doesn't have ANYTHING concrete, she always pivots to scare-mongering language on criminality but never gives any evidence for her approach. No new ideas. Not a clue.

Just a couple more resources to keep you going.
Patel's nasty new plan for asylum has been universally condemned by experts and refugee supporting organisations.
Even UNHCR UK taken an unusually strong line in criticising it, so you know it's gotta be bad. refworld.org/pdfid/60a4db88…

The government CLAIMS to have carried out an equality impact assessment of the new plans (as it is required to) but says it will publish this "soon" (aka when we feel like it, possibly never, definitely only once it's too late to be useful) questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questi…

They also intend to publish the terms of their investigation (mandated by the Windrush Lessons Learned Review) "at some appropriate point" I mean... no rush, honey, it's only been a year. One in which you had time to introduce sweeping new rule changes... questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questi…

And finally, the Home Office is highly confident that introducing a new 6-months limbo waiting period for all asylum seekers will not introduce significant delays to the process. So that's a relief🙄 questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questi…