THERESA May is being called on to carry out a ‘root and branch’ review of her Government’s hostile immigration policy in the wake of the Windrush scandal.
The call comes from SNP justice spokeswoman Joanna Cherry who urged her to scrutinise the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts. She has written to the PM urging her to to scrap the policy which set net migration targets. It follows renewed calls from the SNP and Labour for Home Secretary Amber Rudd to resign after the Windrush debacle, which has seen people who settled in the UK decades ago having access to healthcare and employment rights stopped amid threats of deportation.
“The UK Government’s immigration policy is rotten to the core –the Prime Minister must review the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts,” said Cherry. “The Tory net migration targets introduced are neither practicable nor workable and the Windrush scandal is a direct result of the Home Office’s increasingly frantic attempts to meet those targets.”
She added: “It’s now a week since I called for the resignation of the Home Secretary on account of the scandalous treatment of the Windrush generation. Over the last week her position has become increasingly untenable ... The injustices visited upon the Windrush generation are no mistake. Home Office officials have merely been implementing orders from the top to make life as unpleasant as possible for people identified as soft targets.”
Rudd, who will make a Commons statement today, is facing calls for her resignation amid claims she misled MPs when she told MPs last week the Home Office did not have targets for removals. In a series of late night tweets following the leak of a memorandum referring to targets, she apologised and admitted she should have known about the targets, but said she had not seen the memo even though it was copied to her office. Former immigration minister Brandon Lewis yesterday said Rudd did set an “ambition” to increase the numbers of illegal immigrants being deported by 10 per cent, but was unaware of specific local targets for removals.
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