Category: #ToryPowerAbuses

#ToryPowerAbuses

Victims of the Tories’ hostile environment policies tell Glastonbury of their pain

From the Morning Star: Victims of the Tory Government’s hostile environment spoke at the Glastonbury Festival about the impact of losing their jobs and being separated from their partners.
 
Windrush scandal victim Michael Braithwaite, who arrived in Britain from Barbados in 1961, worked as a special needs teaching assistant but lost his job after being deemed an illegal immigrant. Speaking at Glastonbury Festival’s Left Field stage, he said: “My reputation as a teaching assistant was in tatters. I was in a bad mental state. I didn’t know who to trust.” Mr Braithwaite was told he needed to apply for a biometric card or face deportation, but was refused one three times.
Mr Braithwaite called for Britain’s colonial history to be taught in schools, a policy Labour would introduce under leader Jeremy Corbyn.
 
Laura Clarke also told the Hostile Environment — Who’s Responsible? debate of her plight being separated from her Ethiopian husband with whom she has a three-year-old son. The government’s minimum income requirement requires couples to earn at least £18,600 a year combined to be eligible for a family visa. However as a single mother and as a teacher in Ethiopia, they both earn less. She said: “My husband has only spent six months out of those three years with our son because of the government’s immigration rules. The government’s hostile environment is literally telling us and thousands of others that we are too poor to be together.”

Two government departments ‘are breaking the law over PIP recording failure’

From Disability News Service: Two government departments are breaching equality laws and their human rights obligations by failing to ensure that disabled people can record their face-to-face benefit assessments and appeal tribunals, legal researchers have concluded.

They say the delay by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in ensuring that all disabled people can record their assessments for personal independence payment (PIP) is causing them “significant and predictable harm”.

And they say the failure of the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) to ensure that all PIP appeal tribunals can be recorded is also causing “significant and predictable harm” to disabled people. MoJ’s failure to assess or even acknowledge the harm caused by the absence of recording equipment at many tribunal venues means its actions are unlawful, say researchers from the International Disability Law Clinic (IDLC) at the University of Leeds.

They say both DWP and MoJ are breaching the Equality Act, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the European Convention on Human Rights. And they say the government’s policies are unjustified and have an “adverse impact” on disabled people.

[Read full article on Disability News Service…]

Javid under fire over ‘illegal’ cross-Channel asylum seekers claim

From The Guardian: Lawyers and campaigners have criticised Sajid Javid after the home secretary appeared to suggest asylum seekers should be deterred from crossing the Channel in small boats by making it harder to gain asylum, a right enshrined in international law.

The Refugee Council called the comments “deeply concerning” and said the suggestion of denying asylum was unlawful. The criticism was echoed by the shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, who called the comments “a disgrace”. […]

Colin Yeo, a leading immigration and asylum barrister at Garden Court chambers, said the home secretary’s apparent threat was illegal. “Sending genuine refugees to face persecution in order to dissuade others from seeking to come here is plainly illegal,” he told the Guardian.

“I imagine the home secretary knows this, but if so it is depressing that he is still saying it as a way of trying to make himself sound tough. The latest asylum statistics show that around three-quarters of Iranian asylum claims succeed, so we are talking here about genuine refugees.”

[Read full article on Guardian website…]

Theresa May’s government found in contempt of Parliament

From Business Insider: Theresa May’s government has been found in contempt of parliament after it refused to comply with a motion passed by MPs demanding that it release the full legal advice on the prime minister’s Brexit deal.

MPs voted by 311 to 293 to find May’s government in contempt on Tuesday afternoon. It is the first time a UK government has been found in contempt by MPs in parliamentary history.

[Read full article on Business Insider website…]

Corbyn exposes May’s hypocrisy over withholding Brexit legal advice

From the Morning Star: Jeremy Corbyn exposed Theresa May’s hypocrisy in her withholding of Brexit legal advice yesterday by surprising her with a letter she had sent to the last Labour government that demanded they publish the legal advice they had received over the Iraq War.

During Prime Minister’s Questions the Labour leader urged the PM to reveal to MPs the “warts and all” legal advice on her unpopular Brexit deal so that they can make an informed decision over whether to let it pass through parliament on December 11.

He said she should “practise what she preached” and told MPs that she, as shadow leader of the Commons, had written to the then PM Gordon Brown in 2007 to demand the legal advice on invading Iraq.

[Read full article on Morning Star website…]

Labour accuses Tories of constituency boundary ‘power grab’

From The Guardian: The final plans for revamped parliamentary constituencies have been published, which would cut the number of seats in the House of Commons from 650 to 600, proposals condemned by Labour and electoral campaigners as unfair and pointless.

Labour has fiercely opposed the idea, and with some Conservatives expected to rebel it remains by no means certain that the plan, which has to be approved by parliament, will be put into effect. The government has not yet announced a timetable for presenting the proposals to parliament.

Initial proposals for constituencies in England and Wales brought calculations that the changes could cost Labour 23 seats, with the party calling it “gerrymandering”.

Labour’s shadow Cabinet Office minister, Cat Smith, said the final recommendations amounted to “an undemocratic power grab”. She said: “With no plans to reduce the number of ministers, the government is weakening the role of parliament and creating unprecedented levels of executive dominance at the expense of backbenchers, when parliament is meant to be taking back control. Cutting the number of MPs by 50 as we prepare to leave the European Union is further proof this government is clamouring to tighten its grip on power.”

[Read full article on Guardian website…]

164 Windrush generation people may have been wrongly removed or detained

From The Guardian: A total of 164 Windrush generation people may have been wrongly removed or detained, according to detailed analysis by the Home Office of almost 12,000 immigration cases.

The home secretary has said he will apologise to 18 Windrush people who the government believes were “most likely to have suffered detriment because their right to be in the UK was not recognised”. The narrowness of the official apology was immediately condemned as worrying by Amnesty.

A review of 11,800 cases identified 18 where the home secretary said he believed his “department is most likely to have acted wrongfully”. Eleven of those 18 voluntarily left the country, some having been served with enforcement papers informing them they had no right to be in the UK; seven of them were detained but subsequently released without being removed.

In each of those cases the individual is believed to have come from the Caribbean before 1973 and stayed in Britain permanently but they were unable to prove they were a permanent resident.

However, the Home Office acknowledged that it was looking at 164 cases where people had been either wrongly detained, forcibly removed from the country or mistakenly told they must leave the country. Officials said the precise circumstances in which some of the 164 had been detained or encouraged to leave were not yet known, which they said is why official apologies were only being made to 18 people for the moment.

Anthony Bryan, 60, who spent five weeks in immigration removal centres over the past two years despite having lived in the UK for more than half a century, said he had yet to receive a letter of apology from the home secretary.

[Read full article on Guardian website…]

Families torn apart as visa misery hits foreign spouses

From The Observer: On 17 December last year, Paige Smith stood on a bridge above a road in north London. “I don’t remember too much, just standing there, looking over the edge, thinking ‘I’m just going to jump’, but then two police officers – I don’t know where they came from – managed to talk me down.”

Smith, 24, had been left suicidal by the Kafkaesque nightmare in which she and her Albanian fiance, Fatjon Ballmi, 23, had found themselves since becoming engaged.

Last September, having been together for nearly three years, they applied for a fiance visa for Ballmi but, two months later, the Home Office refused, stating, incorrectly, that Smith did not meet the £18,600 income threshold necessary to bring her partner into the country, a requirement introduced in 2012 by Theresa May, who was then home secretary.

“We never expected a refusal and I took it quite badly,” Smith said. “I was suffering mentally, having been away from my fiance for 11 weeks in total and I tried to commit suicide. I was sectioned, taken to hospital and stayed there for just under 24 hours before they let me go.”

The Home Office had lost a crucial payslip proving that Smith met the criteria. “The payslip was sent to them four times including from my solicitor and MP. The joke of it is they had my bank statements and access to HMRC to see how much I get paid.”

An appeal judge took less than 10 minutes in June to rule that the visa should be issued. The Home Office took another two months to confirm that it would not appeal.

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Voter fraud cases vs. impact of Tory Government’s ID scheme

From Full Fact:

In a single day across five councils, twice as many people didn’t vote due to having incorrect ID, as have been accused…

Posted by Full Fact on Sunday, July 29, 2018

 

UK facing legal action over ‘unlawful’ decision not to protect Isis ‘Beatles’ from death penalty

From The Independent: Legal action could be launched against the government over its failure to demand that two members of a British Isis cell will not be executed in the US. MPs are in uproar over not being consulted about the reversal of a long-held policy barring extradition or intelligence sharing in cases where the death penalty may be used.

[Read article on Independent website…]

Responsibility for Windrush deportations rests “squarely on Theresa May’s shoulders” – Caroline Lucas

From Morning Star: Responsibility for the Windrush scandal falls “squarely on the shoulders” of Theresa May for ignoring a report warning her what would happen, Green Party co-leader Caroline Lucas charged yesterday.

The Brighton Pavilion MP had tabled a written question asking if Ms May, as home secretary, had acted on the Legal Action Group’s prescient October 2014 report Chasing Status.

Immigration Minister Caroline Nokes responded: ”No specific action was taken as a result of this report.”

The report recommended a number of measures which could have prevented the Windrush scandal, including to set up a special unit to fast-track cases of people living in Britain on January 1 1973.

It also called for the restoration of legal aid for these cases, allowing Commonwealth-born citizens to work, access the the NHS and claim benefits and for Home Office proof of residence standards to be revised.

Another of the report’s recommendations was for “greater openness” from the Home Office about its archiving and destruction policies, and for it to accept that some immigration records could be rendered inaccurate or incomplete over time.

[Read full article on Morning Star website…]

MPs condemn Home Office over detained Windrush pair

From The Guardian: The Home Office behaved in a “shocking” manner towards two Windrush citizens, Paulette Wilson and Anthony Bryan, both of whom were wrongly sent to immigration detention centres before a planned removal from the UK, despite being continuously resident for around 50 years, a committee of MPs and peers has ruled.

The Home Office displayed an “inadequate regard for the human rights” of those wrongly detained as a result of immigration enforcement, the report by the joint committee on human rights concluded.

Harriet Harman, the committee’s chair, said: “What happened to these two people was a total violation of their human rights by the state’s most powerful government department. It needs to face up to what happened before it can even begin to acknowledge the scale of the problem and stop it happening again.”

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