Allison Pearson of the Daily Telegraph sticking up for Priti Patel of the Home Office hardly counts as surprising.
Pearson wrote a column yesterday under the headline, “I’m on Priti Patel’s side in the deportation row – because she’s on our side.”
The article sits behind a paywall, where it can stay as far as I’m concerned. But here is the intro: “Seventeen rapists, killers and drug dealers were deported in the small hours of yesterday morning.”
That’s one way of looking at the latest post-Windrush disgrace dished up by the government. Another might be to say that 15 black Britons who served time for the crimes they committed have been expelled to countries to which they have few, if any, connection.
Another way again might be to wonder at the double standards that apply to black people in these circumstances. Rarely do you read of white people who’ve served prison sentences being “sent back” to the USA or Australia or even Canada (although royal ‘offenders’ do sometimes take refuge in that last location).
Yet black people who have offended, and served their time, are being deported so that the government can look tough.
Rishi Sunak, chief secretary to the Treasury, told Sky News that all due process had been followed. Tellingly, he then said: “We have an established process for ensuring that where we have foreign nationals who have committed crimes here, they should be, where possible, deported.”
Key here is the use of “foreign nationals” to make it sound as if these are foreign criminals being sent back to where they have recently come from. Instead, they are British citizens in the main who committed crimes and were punished. To then expel them suggests black people deserve a higher form of punishment than white people.
Michael McDonald, one of those waiting to be deported, wrote a short article for yesterday’s Guardian under the heading: “I served my time in prison. So why am I being deported?”
McDonald added: “I’ve lived in Britain 20 years, raised children here and paid my taxes. In Jamaica I really will be a ‘foreigner’.”
The sentence was for drug dealing. Boris Johnson, that second-rate Churchill karaoke act with his shouting and arm waving, has admitted to having used cocaine when young. In other words, he was complicit in the sort of crimes committed by drug dealers. But he’s an old Etonian posh boy so it doesn’t matter.
The sentence has also been imposed on McDonald’s family, whose kids keeping asking him on the phone: “Daddy, when are you coming home?”
That home is in Nottingham, “But when the government talks about sending me ‘back’, they mean a place that’s completely foreign to me – Jamaica. I have no family in Jamaica; my parents, siblings, aunts and uncles all live in the UK and have British citizenship.”
That is a cruel way for a country to behave and I only feel shame.
The thought of Allison Pearson behind her paywall summons up a walled garden where the roses have more thorns than petals, as she walks about muttering that the Home Secretary is “on our side”.
Which side is that? Pearson sometimes harps on about her Christianity, but none of this sounds remotely Christian to me; but what does an old agnostic know about anything?
I don’t want to be on Allison’s side or on Priti’s side. All I want, or at least all I try to do, not always successfully, is to be on the side of humanity. Deporting Michael McDonald achieves nothing as he’s been punished already. All it does it unnecessarily punish his loved ones in the name of looking tough.
And should Priti Patel ever slip up and be threatened with expulsion to Uganda, from where her Ugandan-Indian parents arrived in 1972, I would stick up for her right to remain here, too.
And, yes, Priti Patel was born in London, but she seems strangely obsessed with punishing immigrants whose lives turned out less well.