P
riti Patel is the sort of determined no-nonsense figure who tends to ruffle feathers, to say the least. As with recent accusations of bullying and perceptions of her behaviour, for which she apologised (sort of), her statements on immigration are usually controversial if not divisive, and if not deliberately provocative. Sometimes, she says, her own outlook and the attacks she attracts are influenced by her own background as the daughter of an Asian family expelled like so many by President Amin of Uganda in 1972. She gives no quarter. She takes great comfort from the 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2019 general election as her mandate to implement what she takes to be the people’s attitude towards migration.
That doesn’t mean that everything that emanates from her Home Office is automatically wrong-headed or impractical. Brexit, the loss of security for Hong Kong citizens, and the flow of migrants making their way across the English Channel in flimsy dinghies mean that immigration policy has to change. The New Plan for Immigration she has unveiled seems enough to keep even her substantial tram of civil servants occupied for some years. She has radical proposals, but almost concealed beneath the hardline rhetoric about life sentences for people smugglers, Patel has summarily scrapped the cornerstone of Conservative immigration policy for the past decade – the target, perhaps casually arrived at, to limit migration to the UK to the “tens of thousands”. She has buried it.
