Amber Rudd has resigned as Home Secretary.
I have been tweeting about her conduct for the last few days. I am pleased she has had to face the consequences of her actions. But let's be clear, her resignation is only some punctuation in a longer sentence for those whose persecution she has pursued. As a result it is not enough to right all wrongs.
It is true that it is good news that, contrary to one opinion I was confidently given yesterday, she has realised that she has no choice but comply with the parliamentary conventions on resignation when misleading the House. If contempt for that had gone then accountability would have been shattered. But it hasn't been.
And it is good news that her resignation may let a successor more readily change policy: Theresa May can hardly demand the perpetuation of her own deeply hostile, and I think racist, policies now.
And let's give credit where it is due: full marks to the Guardian on this. That paper is doing a phenomenal job at present.
But let's then stand back and realise that this resignation was not about the deeply hostile and, I think racist, policy the Home Office was pursuing.
And this resignation does not hold the Prime Minister to account for her actions in creating that policy.
What is more, this resignation will allay no one's fears as the U.K. pursues Brexit for the main purpose of creating a more hostile environment for migrants.
And that the hostility will continue is apparent: Rudd did not have the decency to apologise to those she had mistreated in her resignation letter. It was instead a deliberate show of arrognce on the issue, as if it was to her credit that all was now being put right.
So Rudd going is important, because it had to happen. But it does not change the contempt for other people that runs through the government and parts of British society. And that is the malaise that is literally crippling this country right now, and that May represents. Something much more radical is required to address that and, regrettably, there is little chance of it happening as yet.
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It beggars belief that you can openly lie and keep your job as MP. Rudd had the slimmest of margins after some 5 recounts and on the last one an uncounted ballot box “found” which scraped her in by a few hundred. The idea that she can ruin people’s lives and then lie to parliament and keep her job is shocking.
She should not have been allowed to resign from the front bench. She should have been sacked. She should also now lose her job as MP and any pension accruments and a new by election should be called.
el Deco says:
“It beggars belief that you can openly lie and keep your job as MP…”
Well obviously you couldn’t…but in this case Amber Rudd ‘inadvertently’ misled parliament so that’s not like openly lying ? ….is it…..?
I wonder did anybody ever have to resign for ‘inadvertently misleading’ the electorate? Or do they just have to wait for the next election to see if anybody remembers.
Tories have made a hostile environment for pretty much everybody and everything except white and working. Disabled – bedroom tax, PIP withdrawal, motobility withdrawal. Young – education maintenance allowance withdrawal. Everybody – legal aid withdrawal. The list is endless.
That endless list must also include a hostile environment to vote at all with trials of voter ID at some polls on Thursday.
The propagator of the “magic money tree”.
Who is going to fertilise it now?
Chauncey Gardiner?
Credit also must go to David Lammy, Dawn Butler and Diane Abbott MPs for sticking it to Rudd in the commons and media repeatedly. I’d add Yvette Cooper to that list too, but that credit should be tempered by her refusal to properly oppose the racist 2014 act that set a lot of this up when she was Shadow to Theresa May as Home Secretary.
I’d also give credit to Jeremy Corbyn who, with just a few other MPs (Abbott included) voted against that 2014 act – we all know he’s not your cup of tea over Brexit, but that’s just another example where he’s shown the ‘strong, calm voice’ you were hoping for. I think Theresa May openly lying to him about the Landing Papers to score points in PMQs could well come back to haunt her, now that her ‘firewall’ has gone.
As a genuine question: how do you engage in any kind of law enforcement (eg police, parking officers, tax, social security, regulatory, immigration) without some kind of target against which performance is measured?
If I were a parking enforcement officer, why bother imposing fines on anyone if my performance is not measured? I might as well have a quiet life and avoid confrontation.
And therefore if I have performance targets, aren’t I going to go after the easy targets – the ones that are easy to catch, and unlikely to fight back?
Adam S says:
” how do you engage in any kind of law enforcement ….without some kind of target against which performance is measured?”
Maybe you don’t. But you don’t lie about the existence of targets or plead ignorance, or pretend it’s somebody else’s fault. (Especially if the person whose fault it is happens to be your boss and you want to keep your job 🙂 )
Also there is a significant difference between creating targets and monitoring performance.
Thanks Andy
“Also there is a significant difference between creating targets and monitoring performance.”
Can you explain that difference?
How do you monitor performance in a fair and transparent way without some objective (and probably quantifiable) measure of what was achieved – in plain English, a target?
If it is simply ‘the opinion of your boss’, that’s not very transparent is it? That might be OK in a small business, but not in a public service.
Adam S says:
“Also there is a significant difference between creating targets and monitoring performance.”
Can you explain that difference? Well I think ‘creating a hostile environment’ might offer a clue.
“How do you monitor performance in a fair and transparent way without some objective (and probably quantifiable) measure of what was achieved — in plain English, a target?”
Well, Adam as I said, maybe can’t do it, but if you have targets you should defend the need for them and not simply dissemble and pretend you don’t have them.
“If it is simply ‘the opinion of your boss’, that’s not very transparent is it? That might be OK in a small business, but not in a public service.”
It’s very much not OK in public service, but if you wish to pursue that point, it puts Theresa May ‘in the dock’, and that would be rather inconvenient for the government right now. It’s not the boss’s opinion at stake here it’s her job.
I don’t think it’s particularly OK in a small business either really.
There’s a difference between “targets” and what might be called “performance indicators”. Targets may be set arbitrarily without any objective analysis of the problem, its extent and its resolution and can have unforeseen and negative consequences, as has been seen with “waiting times targets”. They are often politically driven.
I would also question the whole purpose of this policy and ask what good is it doing. Apparently there are no reliable figures for the number of illegal immigrants with many guesses settling around half a million +or- some arbitrary figure. I feel this is more a political issue for point scoring and scare-mongering than a substantive social or economic issue. And we’ve seen how the policy has led to errors and heart-breaking individual stories. Surely, there’s a more humane way of dealing with the “problem”?
The word Target and its implications are at the heart of the matter.
‘Target’ setting can be entirely appropriate when allocating resource because if you have a need for a resource to manage illegal immigration you need to think through your expectation of how many people you expect to remove. If you don’t have the resource how will you achieve what the law (or even the rules around free movement of labour!) requires. When by definition you cannot objectively quantify the scale of the problem – how many illegal immigrants are there – setting ‘Targets’ sends the wrong message.
The real problem is the ‘hostile environment’ and its implementation where a climate of suspicion is generated, associated with a net migration ‘target’ that was plucked out of the air for bogus political purposes in a pathetic form of ‘willy waving’ and where one part of the equation (emigration by Brits) was something over which none of the parties had any control at all.
Next, add in a tinpot macho approach from T.May and then A.Rudd together with what appears a severe empathy deficit and surprise surprise brow-beaten Home Office staff look for any ways to get the numbers up to prove how well they are doing their job and ensure they aren’t the next on the downsizing list.
There are numerous examples in industry of how gaming the system develops to meet badly designed and overbearing performance tyrannies. The difference with this one is that it has had catastrophic consequences for the lives of fellow citizens far less able to stand up for their rights.
It is the architect of this scandal that should be in the dock (T.May) alongside her fellow competitor for most disasterous PM (D.Cameron) and a similar playbook is being delivered with the sanctions regime in the DWP originated by the eternally wrong IDS.
Thanks
“parliamentary conventions on resignation when misleading the House….”
A spark of parliamentary decency sufficient to set Amber Rudd’s pants on fire.
Theresa May’s pants are apparently well fortified with asbestos.
Andy Crow says: “Theresa May’s pants are apparently well fortified with asbestos.”
But does this mean her cabinet is now Rudd(er)less?
Not at all rudderless. This ship of callous individuals is fortified with the grand old Tory values of hatred and bile towards the poor and vulnerable which it is perusing with a vengeance. Let’s just hope that these same evil values lead it towards the rocks when it will rightly flounder.
Apologies for the tangential comment. As ever, Richard has hit a nerve.
she has no choice but comply with the parliamentary conventions on resignation when misleading the House.
But isn’t misleading Parliament an everyday, all-day occurrence?
With my own bete noire, HS2, successive transport ministers claim that HS2 will balance the country’s economy between north & south. Yet all empirical evidence from the world’s existing high speed rail systems states the opposite: if HS2 has an economic impact, it will encourage the migration of jobs from the midlands & the north to the south. This evidence has been compiled by academics & presented to Parliament. As a counter, KPMG were hired by lobbyists to fabricate positive numbers via computer simulation (& failed at their first attempt), an approach described by a genuine expert as having no statistical basis. Seized by local & national politicians for their own purely political ends, this extremely dodgy dossier has been used to drown out the objective observations of reality.
Mike says:
He’s sceptical about the claim….
“…..that HS2 will balance the country’s economy between north & south. …..”
Given that by a lot of people’s reckoning Birmingham is in the South anyway, and at best could only be described as in the Midlands, I think he’s right to be sceptical.
Brexit, a racist immigration policy and the Windrush scandal are what happens when our country looses it’s head about immigrants, and politicians indulge and appeal to prejudice to advance their grubby careers.
Racists howled endlessly that their “debate” on immigration was being shut down while they talked about nothing else.
Now they’re performing rhetorical gymnastics insisting through their crocodile tears that they didn’t mean the Windrush kids. They’d have us believe they like and care about them.
It’s such a load of disingeuous cobblers. They helped to bring the hostile environment about just as much as the hysterical headlines in the right wing rags, with their petty-minded “I’m not racist but….” rubbish.
They own this nasty, malevolent situation. They just haven’t the integrity to admit it.
How can the Prime Minister stay in her job when she has been fully aware of this deceit even when her ministers were defending Rudd over the weekend. Surely Corbyn will nail her on this at PM’s QT but somehow I think she will brazen it out. Democracy is just about on its last legs.
Surely Corbyn will nail her on this
Give him a nail and a nice big hammer to hit it with and he will inevitably drive it through his own foot.