Sajid Javid has been appointed as Home Secretary, replacing Amber Rudd who resigned after repeatedly struggling to account for her role in the unjust treatment of Windrush-generation migrants. Many political commentators claim this as a moderate appointment and have been repeatedly stating the fact that he is a second-generation Pakistani born in the UK, but this has little bearing on the fact that he is a right-wing, Margaret Thatcher devotee, who upholds the same regressive ideology.
Previously he was the communities and local government minister, with his biggest challenge thus far being the Grenfell tower disaster.
Which he has repeatedly failed to organise suitable housing for the victims of the fire.
The right man for the job?
Javid’s first plan will be to clean up the mess left by Amber Rudd and Theresa May but is he up to the task and importantly, is he the right person for the job? The first problem is that he has contributed to the Windrush disaster that has engulfed the department by voting in favour of every immigration policy put forward by Theresa May when she was Home Secretary herself. He has also voted against giving rights to EU citizens who are already living in the UK post-Brexit and has generally taken a hard-line approach to immigration.
The hostile environment created by Theresa May that Javid voted in favour for, was the 2014 Immigration Act and it made it harder for people to prove that they had the right to remain in the UK.
Furthermore, he has previously tweet the same obscene rhetoric about ‘uncontrolled immigration’ under the last Labour government. He has voted against banning the detention of pregnant women for immigration reasons, voted in favour of making it an offence for someone to work or rent a home if their immigration status prohibits it and for immigration checks on those who want to open a bank account.
He also voted in favour of restricting the already small amount of support available to failed asylum seekers and illegal migrants and he also voted against allowing asylum seekers permission to work if the decision on their application takes longer than 6 months. He has not only been complicit in not standing up for migrants but actively voting to create the hostile environment that has created the Windrush disaster but the move to put him in the role is most likely a PR decision because of the fact that he is a second-generation Pakistani who was born in Britain.
Javid begins as he probably means to go on
Sajid Javid’s first day in the office could have gone better, within 10 minutes of his first speech to parliament, he had already misled parliament – the exact reason why his predecessor Amber Rudd resigned – over the Windrush disaster. In response to a question by Diane Abbott about the protections removed by the Immigration Act 2014 for the Windrush generation, he said that the protections were not removed. However, this fact is provably wrong as proved by Diane Abbott herself when she tweeted the article from the Guardian that revealed key protections had been removed that could and has affected the Windrush generation.
This is not the first time that he has knowingly misled parliament, back in December he published figures that local councils set their 2018 budgets to, however, Andrew Gwynne received a reply to his query whether he and his office knew that the figures they published were wrong.
Both Javid and his office admitted in the reply that when they published the figures, they knew that they weren’t accurate. So, is he the man for the job or is this just another attempt to put a shield in front of the real culprit of this mess, Theresa May?
