Professor Gus John. Photo courtesy wikipedia
On 11 August 2021, the Daily Mail reported an article by Priti Patel (containing an image of her with a face like thunder) in which she vented her frustration that 43 of an intended 50 people had evaded deportation to Jamaica on a charter flight following legal interventions.
The flight did eventually leave with 7 passengers, taking social distancing to ridiculous lengths and massively deepening Britain’s carbon footprint.
Priti Patel wrote: “As Home Secretary, keeping the public safe is my number one priority. A key part of that mission is removing people who come to this country, abuse our hospitality, and commit crimes… They had been convicted of a variety of violent, obscene and abhorrent crimes including rape, sexual offences against children, assault and possession of offensive weapons….Their criminal acts will have had a devastating impact on their victims. What sort of message would it send to them – and to the public more widely – if we simply allowed these people back onto our streets?… Allowing foreign nationals convicted of such offences to remain in the UK should be a stain on the consciousness of our nation“.
On 12 August, some 20 hours later, it was reported that Jake Davison, a 22 year old Plymouth resident had shot and killed five people, including a three year old girl and her father, in the Keyham area of the city, before turning the gun on himself.
Police revealed that Davison was a licensed firearms holder and said that the incident, the worst mass shooting in Britain since 2010, was not terror-related.
Davison was a white British male.
It was later reported that his first victim was his own mother. Davison had his shotgun certificate revoked last September following an allegation of assault, but his gun license was returned in July this year, one month before his shooting spree.
Priti Patel visited Keyham, bringing flowers and condolences to bereaved relatives and the wider community.
Let’s examine for a moment Patel’s indignant claims.
Keeping the public safe is her number one priority. That, too, presumably is one of the reasons why judges send offenders to prison.
Another, arguably more important reason is to reform and rehabilitate them so that they might have less inclination and hopefully less cause to reoffend. That is why time and not enough money is spent on prison education and counselling and wellbeing programmes, without which punishment becomes a blunt instrument that simply generates resentment, anger and nihilism.
So, when Priti Patel says: “It is fact, that UK laws rightly allow us to deport foreign nationals convicted of an offence in the UK and sentenced to 12 months or more imprisonment where no exceptions stop it“, she ought to pause to consider what the point of imprisoning people is, if the state is going to deport them anyway.
Is it that they’re being given time to learn how to be better and more law abiding citizens in the countries to which they would be deported having served their sentence? And why should allowing them to remain in the UK be a stain on the consciousness of our nation?
If they are sufficiently rehabilitated by our enlightened prison service to be able to turn their lives around, compensate for school exclusion and poor schooling outcomes, acquire the literacy, numeracy and social and life skills that far too many of them lack on entering prison and confidently contribute to family, economy and society, why should their post-prison presence be a stain on the consciousness of our nation?
And whom does this ‘our’ nation include?
Does it include those law abiding, hardworking grandparents and great grandparents who would have nurtured them from childhood, supported them through school, helped them deal with the racism they would have suffered at the hands of school managers, careers advisers, employers, police in their communities and the challenges of street life?
Does it include the wider Caribbean diaspora who are never made to feel included in the ‘we’ and ‘our’ that politicians use to placate those of ‘us’ who never wanted ‘them’ here in the first place, born here or borne here?
The racialisation of immigration
Crime meets race when the racialisation of immigration segues into the racialisation of crime.
Are crimes such as rape, sexual offences against children, assault and possession of offensive weapons any less violent, obscene and abhorrent when committed by British nationals rather than foreign nationals?
Is that why black British nationals whom Britain cannot legally deport are given harsher sentences than white British nationals for the same crimes? And is that considered a righteous punishment for their abuse of ‘our’ hospitality in allowing them to be part of ‘our’ nation in the first place?
What is Priti Patel to make of Jake Davison and the other white murderers, rapists, sex offenders, child groomers, wife beaters, armed robbers and carriers of offensive weapons who populate our communities in plain sight – sometimes in police uniforms – and are in our prisons in far greater numbers than black offenders?
Why does she conveniently fail to distinguish between black offenders, predominantly male, who through no fault of their own ended up undocumented, but were caught up in youth offending and carried spent criminal convictions just like their white counterparts, before they were caught in the hostile environment dragnet, and career criminals who run the gauntlet between the Caribbean, USA and Europe?
Another egregious example of crime meeting race and of unashamed hubris is when Patel says: “Their criminal acts will have had a devastating impact on their victims. What sort of message would it send to them – and to the public more widely – if we simply allowed these people back onto our streets?’
Year on year, we have disturbing examples of white British criminals being allowed back onto our streets and proceeding to commit murder, especially of former wives or partners. Commentary on such events is hardly ever conducted with a focus on race or ethnicity, or on the right of those people to be let out of jail having served their sentence and satisfied the parole board that they no longer pose a danger to the public.
By Patel’s logic, those people, British nationality notwithstanding, should be transported to islands in the South Atlantic, St Helena for example, that remain British territories and kept there for all time in order to keep the public safe and not be a stain on the consciousness of our nation.
Hopefully, Keyham will serve as a lesson to Patel that you cannot fix bad law and the flagrant abuse of that law simply by cracking down on those who legitimately advocate on behalf of would be deportees whose rights are being trampled upon. Her wish is that her New Plan for Immigration and the Nationality and Borders Bill will eliminate all possibility of legal challenge to deportation decisions.
Patel says ‘the British people have had enough – they want to see change’. She is absolutely right.
We who are British and Black have had enough of state racism and of being treated as if our lives don’t matter.
The Universe saw fit to answer Patel in less than 24 hours. While you are seeking to be rid of them as having no right to remain here, those whom you validate automatically as belonging and literally give a licence to kill shock their community and the nation by doing just that. Article republished from www.voice-online.co.uk
