Government on verge of keeping a promise

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In what looks superficially like an extremely rare exhibition of prescience from the current government, Amber Rudd (when she was Home Secretary last April) promised that the application process for citizens of the EU27 wanting to remain in the UK would be “as easy as setting up an online account at LK Bennett”.  I’ll admit that I had never heard of LK Bennett until the news yesterday that it was going into administration, but at last it looks like the government is on the verge of honouring one of its Brexit commitments.  It is now extremely likely that the process will indeed be as easy as setting up an online account with a defunct company – and probably about as much use as well.

The big unanswered question is whether the government has deliberately engineered the company’s failure in order to honour its promise, or whether the promise is coming true entirely by accident.  No prizes for guessing which I think is the likeliest.

The wrong reason for resigning.

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The Home Secretary has finally bowed to the inevitable and departed, although the real architect of the ‘hostile environment’ policy remains in Downing Street, for the time being at least.  It seems more likely at present that she will be brought down by bowing to another inevitable – accepting that the simplistic Brexit desired by her own party’s extremists is simply not a viable proposition.

It seems clear that the ‘hostile environment’ policy was discriminatory in its effect: it had more impact on those immigrants of a different skin colour.  I’m not convinced that that necessarily means that it was intended as a racist policy, or that those devising and implementing it were racist.  I think it’s actually worse than that – they were blind to the colour of those being deported because they were blind to their humanity.  Reducing them to numbers in a spreadsheet isn’t racially motivated, even if its effect turns out to be discriminatory.  Their real sin was that act of reducing people to numbers for the sake of pandering to an anti-immigrant culture in order to win votes.

In the same way, I’ve never been entirely convinced that the leading Brexiteers, who fought the referendum campaign largely on an anti-immigration platform, are actually either racist or xenophobic.  Again, it’s worse than that: they are people who were willing to leverage racism and xenophobia in others to achieve a result which they didn’t think they could bring about by honest argument and debate.

The common thread between the two is that element of dishonesty and the willingness to appease sentiments which they don’t share themselves.  In the process, rather than attempting to address the fears and concerns which many people clearly have about immigration, they have succeeded in reinforcing and legitimising even more extreme viewpoints.  That, rather than simply misleading parliament, whether intentionally or otherwise, is the real sin, but it’s one that they show no sign of even recognising.

Windrush merely a symptom

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Many years ago, on some management course or other, I remember the lecturer stressing that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”.  As a general rule, it has considerable merit – how can you ever know whether you’re progressing towards a goal if you can’t somehow quantify that progress?  And as anyone subject to any sort of annual performance review will know, all targets are supposed to be SMART, where the M stands for measurable.  It struck me at the time, however, that there was something missing from this simplistic formulation, because the route selected to arrive at the goal is as important – and sometimes more important – than the goal itself.  Concentration on the measurability of progress leads to a target-chasing culture which can, and frequently does, ignore the wider needs of the organisation, its clients, and the people who work within it.

I found myself wondering yesterday whether those senior officials in the Home Office or its agencies who created the local targets of which their bosses were completely unaware (allegedly) for deportations had been on a similar course, but without applying any critical reasoning to the bald statement about the need for measurability.  What they seem to have done, in effect, is to take the overall policy handed down by their political masters (we must get immigration down, and we must deport illegals, and we will do so by creating a hostile environment for them) and turned that into performance targets for staff, following the standard SMART rules.  And, with their annual reviews decided on the basis of achieving the targets they were given, those staff have chased the targets relentlessly.  The staff have attempted to do what they were told was expected of them, and left wider considerations about the impact on those being pursued for deportation and the image and perception of their department to those on higher pay grades.

Now, as it happens, I disagree with the overall policy in principle, but even assuming that the policy itself was a sensible and desirable one, those who promoted it – basically May and Rudd – cannot simply absolve themselves of all responsibility, even it is entirely true that it was the senior officials who turned that policy into cold impersonal targets; not least because those at the very top are, and must always be, held responsible for the culture under which the organisation operates.  And what is clear, surely, by now is that they didn’t really care about the culture; they were completely obsessed with achieving the desired outcomes.  I will, though, also repeat a point made previously: those senior officials who took it upon themselves to implement a system of targets as a means of implementing the policy handed down to them cannot simply be absolved of their responsibility for dehumanising people by turning them into numbers.

There is also a wider political issue as well, which goes way beyond May and Rudd.  I can’t help but wonder whether the unfolding debacle around the Home Office’s attempts to deport more people, using an approach which appals many of us, might nevertheless be playing well amongst one of the Tories’ key target audiences.  All of this has, after all, come about because politicians have been keen to chase the votes of those opposed to immigration by being tough on immigrants.  An anti-immigrant culture has developed and spread, actively encouraged by politicians (and Labour have been as bad – just remember Ed Miliband’s famous mug)  in which it is perfectly possible that many will see the efforts of May and Rudd to be praiseworthy rather than contemptible.  Decades of anti-immigration rhetoric will not be overturned by a few cosmetic changes to policy, nor even by the resignations of May, Rudd, and the top officials involved.  The required cultural shift in political debate is much greater than that.