Last Saturday was a very important occasion indeed. After months of planning, countless hours of meticulously crafting stunning flower arrangements, weeks spent deliberating over which pieces of British produce to present for the distinguished attendees, and many moments spent grooming horses to a royal standard, it was time for the 179th Hadleigh Show. For me, just as for many of the thousands of people attending from across the region, this event is a real highlight in the calendar, celebrating the very best of life in Suffolk. As we now limber up for the Suffolk Show and Suffolk Day, not to mention supporting England in the looming World Cup, it’s a reminder of the importance of local, regional and national identity.
It’s wonderful how we can unite as a nation by hanging up the Union Jack bunting for the royal wedding; I think it’s great that Suffolk, a county that prefers the gentle to the brash, can seek to promote its profundity of attractions with a dedicated day next month (and for which my colleagues and I will be out in force in Westminster). This is all about identity and the communities with which we identify. And yet, the most defining legal part of our identity – our nationality – is facing huge strain as the system that controls who has access to that legal identity has been found wanting; meanwhile our need to reform that system to reflect the EU referendum result remains pressing, with many key questions unanswered.
Readers will be aware of the ‘Windrush’ issue broadly referring to revelations that a significant number of immigrants who were British, but first arrived in the UK many years ago with full paperwork, were then treated in more recent years as if they were here in the country illegally. Someone affected by this issue recently appeared at one of my surgeries.
Naturally, the details of such cases are strictly confidential but I can confirm that the constituent in question fitted the category of ‘undocumented arrivals’ who in recent years have found the system much tougher, and the fees vastly higher, for renewing existing rights that were established decades ago. They were not of Afro-Caribbean background like many Windrush cases, but Antipodean, with family links to the UK going back generations, and yet suddenly finding it all but impossible to navigate our immigration system.
Such cases do not reflect well on our nation, and it was right in the recent Windrush debate in the Commons that MPs from all sides – and our new Home Secretary, Sajid Javid - expressed profound anger and regret at the impact experienced by persons who have been made to feel like criminals. Nevertheless, as I argued in that debate, the administrative problems experienced by many legitimate, legal British citizens do not mean we should suddenly abandon efforts to tackle illegal immigration. As I stressed, the reason illegal (and legal) immigration has become such an issue, and why a tougher line was taken which arguably led to such adverse unintended consequences, is the sheer scale of arrivals. One Home Office estimate is that there may be as many as one million persons illegally resident in the UK. A responsible UK Government cannot ignore an abuse of legitimate rights of citizenship on so gargantuan a scale, undermining as it does all legal migrants who follow the rule of law, and all taxpayers who expect the system to deter abuse and deport abusers.
Of course, we now need to rapidly address any administrative failings in the Home Office that led to British citizens being treated in an often humiliating fashion. And with Brexit looming, we need to be clear that our system is capable of coping with any new regime that follows the conclusion of our negotiations with the EU.
When the shutters close on the stalls at our county shows, the vast load of cardboard, plastic and other recyclables that remains will go to the Great Blakenham waste plant to be sorted by a team of hardworking Eastern Europeans. Immigrants have made, and continue to make, a huge contribution to our public life and in many cases – like recycling plants – they keep the show on the road doing jobs others might not wish to do. There is a sensible path for UK immigration policy: welcoming those committed to working here; robustly rejecting those who try to thwart our legal routes to citizenship. I hope that we can come together as a country to agree on how such a policy can work in practice.
Article by James Cartlidge MP. Published by the East Anglian Daily Times.