EHRC Raps Tories - OH, HELLO

Last month, the Tories were jubilant: not only had the Equality and Human Rights Commission declined to investigate complaints of Islamophobia against them, but the Commission’s report into allegations of anti-Semitism against the Labour Party gave them free rein to rubbish their opponents. They had come out smelling of roses.

But into every smug and self-satisfied oasis of populist cult worship, a little rain must fall, and yesterday, while the right-leaning part of the media establishment was lauding Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak for cutting overseas aid - another abandonment of soft power to go with leaving the EU - it came pouring.

As the Guardian has reported, “The Home Office broke equalities law when it introduced its hostile environment immigration measures, a critical report from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has concluded … In the latest damning report on the Home Office’s record in relation to its hostile environment policies and the Windrush scandal, the EHRC study detected ‘a lack of commitment’ within the Home Office to the importance of equality”. And there was more. Rather a lot more.

“Negative consequences of the hostile environment were ‘repeatedly ignored, dismissed, or their severity disregarded’, the report found. ‘This happened particularly when they were seen as a barrier to implementing hostile environment policies in a highly politicised environment’. The department’s approach to its legal duty to ensure that its policies complied with equality legalisation was ‘perfunctory’, the study concluded”. And more.

“In its report the EHRC assessed how and whether the Home Office complied with the public sector equality duty (PSED) - a legal requirement … It found that officials failed to appreciate the severity of the negative impacts of its policy on this group of people. Even when the damaging consequences of the hostile environment policies began to emerge, the department failed to engage with representatives of the Windrush generation”.

The interim chair of the EHRC concluded “we found that equality was generally dismissed or overlooked … The treatment of the Windrush generation as a result of hostile environment policies was a shameful stain on British history”. So what has Priti Patel, inexplicably made Home Secretary by alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, got to say about the mess? Not very much, it seems.

She put out a statement jointly with her permanent secretary - no solo shouldering of the blame for her, then - but the Patel Twitter feed was too busy trumpeting all those measures the Tories are taking to recruit the cops they previously sent down the road, and allegedly keeping our borders secure. No room for admitting her party loused up.

So different the reaction to the EHRC when the boot is so firmly on the other foot.

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