“If you lay down with dogs you get fleas.”
So said Labour MP David Lammy in the House of Commons on Monday regarding the scandal of the Empire Windrush children, who came to the UK from 70 years ago but have been threatened with detention and deportation for not keeping their residency status up to date, through - as the Home Office has conceded - “no fault of their own.”
Lammy identified the dog as “far-right rhetoric” and claimed pandering to it led to a 2012 change in the law, requiring people to prove their residency status when getting a job, renting a house or accessing benefits including healthcare.
There were numerous stories about ‘health tourism’ at the time.
The result, Lammy concluded, is the deliberate creation of a “hostile environment for migrants.”
Many Conservative MPs and newspapers have swiftly accepted this point, as they should for consistency, having spent months noting Labour’s flea-bites from lying down with the far left.
But predictably, nobody in London has noticed what this story means for Northern Ireland, where it gives us two new itches to scratch.
The first involves the post-Brexit border.
Concerns about maintaining the UK-Ireland Common Travel Area (CTA) without creating a ‘back door’ for immigration have been considered solved thanks to the 2012 law.
The border in Ireland and all routes across the Irish sea, both within the UK and between Britain and the Republic, can remain as open as they are now because the true immigration frontier is everywhere - policed by employers, landlords and frontline public services.
Unlike almost everything else to do with Brexit, this system is already credible and operational - it has been functioning for six years and has significantly reduced health tourism, for example.
It is matched by a parallel system in the Republic that in may ways is even more advanced. The south’s new Public Services Card is a proof of residency document that is fast becoming compulsory for all dealings with the state.
Brexit swept away unease about these policies by making them the solution to an urgent problem.
Immigration checks, tainted with suspicions of racial profiling, will not be necessary at crossing points within the CTA. It would be a stretch to say the 2012 regime in particular has come to be seen as progressive but it has certainly been viewed with relief across the political spectrum.
If the Windrush scandal has seriously discredited it - and that appears a real danger - the only aspect of the Brexit border that had not been a dilemma will slide back into contention.
If current and future British governments have to choose between checks throughout the UK viewed as racist or checks at Irish Sea crossings viewed only as problematic to unionists, they will inevitably choose the latter.
This scenario seems quite likely to play out. The other itch for Northern Ireland is more theoretical.
The Windrush children and their families arrived in the UK in 1948 as full British citizens by birth but the following year the UK began distinguishing between citizens born in the UK and the commonwealth and this has continued with legal changes in almost every decade since.
New gradations of British passports have been created of progressively lesser value, the extra-territorial birthright to British citizenship has been removed and the right to inherit even restricted forms of citizenship from a parent has been abolished.
This is a repeating, ongoing and aggressive pattern. As recently as 1997, the UK left British-Indian citizens in Hong Kong stateless in contravention of international law. It would not adjust its arbitrary rules even for a small number of its most loyal subjects.
There are echoes of this in the Home Office response to the Windrush scandal, despite all the criticism it is facing. Home secretary Amber Rudd has made urgent promises to those affected, and is constrained by the law, yet she still refers passively to the citizenship system as if it is a natural phenomenon rather than a bureaucracy commanded by a government that can change the law.
The portents for unionists in a united Ireland are obvious. Their continued British citizenship would be initially guaranteed, then whittled away. Residency in Britain is the only thing that might ultimately maintain it and only then by keeping ahead of paperwork requirements, as with the Windrush children. No more British children would be born in Northern Ireland.
How could anyone give an assurance this would not happen, when it has played out everywhere else?
newton@irishnews.com
