I’ve written about our dreadful ‘Home’ Office before: https://bernardjporter.com/2018/05/31/our-unhomely-office/. It really does look like it’s metamorphosing into a typical Soviet-type ‘Ministry of the Interior’. Countless examples are cropping up every week of well-established residents and loving partners and parents being expelled from the country at a few days’ notice, their passports confiscated and sent to the airports they are directed to fly from, often on the basis of wrong information, and without any possibility of appeal. One recent one was an Australian:

“After waiting 14 months for my UK visa application without a single update, this month it was refused. I have just a matter of days to leave the country I love, the partner I love, our dog and our friends. I have also been refused the right to an appeal. My passport has been confiscated and will be sent directly to the airport where I will be met by immigration officers. Worst of all – The Home Office used incorrect information in their refusal letter. I don’t want to have to leave the life I have built, and I don’t want others to go through the anguish our family have been through at the hands of the Home Office over the last year. I started a petition to make things better with the hope we can raise awareness for cases like ours, and the thousands of families who are also being affected.”

I’m only glad my Aussie daughter-in-law managed to fix her dual nationality in time.

This seems to have started during Theresa May’s long stretch as Home Secretary: her ‘hostile environment’, and the rest. She really is a monster. I wonder why so many of our leading women Conservative politicians turn out so – well – ‘unwomanly’? (Is that being sexist? But you know what I mean.)* In Thatcher’s case it was widely blamed on her awful father. May’s vicar father is more obscure – it’s difficult to find out much about him on the internet, which has given rise to some rumours (see https://bernardjporter.com/2018/08/21/sauce-for-the-gander/); but we don’t really know. She obviously believes her quasi-fascistic approach is getting her brownie-points among the great unwashed. Let’s hope she’s wrong. And perhaps be grateful that she can’t have children of her own. Cruel, I know; but she’s not a nice person.

With regard to immigration: do the great unwashed realise that under EU rules any country is permitted to expel immigrants who don’t land jobs after a certain period – a right that the British government has chosen never to exercise? And that of course ‘freedom of movement’ doesn’t apply to non-European immigrants – even Aussies? I’ve never seen it mentioned in the Right-wing press. It rather undermines that argument for Brexit.

• It could be: either the assumption that kindness, charity etc. are distinctively gendered characteristics; or by the suggestion that she could only have got her ideas from her dad.