Tag Archives: home secretary

So Amber Rudd resigns tonight.

In some ways it’s remarkable that she didn’t go sooner. I mean, I’ve seen ministers resign because of a snow storm or be sacked for eating a pie. Here was a Minster staying in office when her department had ruined the lives of British citizens.

She couldn’t survive the leak of a letter from her to the Prime Minister outlining an “aim” of increasing the number of enforced removals by 10%. An aim is sufficiently within the ball park of a target to constitute the most serious offence a minister can commit – misleading Parliament so she’s gone before she had to face the opposition tomorrow.

However, unless the immigration system is going to be completely dismantled and rebuilt from scratch to make it treat people with dignity and respect, it doesn’t really matter who the Home Secretary is.

If I were Theresa May, I’d split the Home Office up into one department that deals with nationality, citizenship, asylum and immigration and another that deals with crime and security. The culture of those two parts needs to be very different.

I thought much better of Amber Rudd before she made that awful Conference speech in which she talked about companies having to report how many immigrants they employed. I had hoped that she would quietly roll back some of the hostile environment nonsense that has been so damaging. I’d like to think that she is a better person than her inability to sort out the mess she inherited at the Home Office would suggest.

I am slightly worried about the balance in the Cabinet. Rudd was the strongest pro-Remain voice in the high level Committee that deals with Brexit and would no doubt have been sticking up for staying in the Customs Union. Whether she will take up that cause on the back benches remains to be seen.

I just about choked on my hot chocolate when the BBC’s Clive Myrie referred to her resignation as a “devastating personal tragedy.” I rather think that the lives of the Windrush generation British Citizens and others that have been ruined by the “hostile environment” policy more closely fit that description. That said, this presumably takes Rudd out of the running to replace Theresa May when the time comes.