Cameron again playing politics with immigration issue
Last week, the British Parliament had its official State Opening. It took place with all the pomp and pageantry that the British do so well. The members of the upper House, the House of Lords, were resplendent in red robes trimmed with fur. And the Queen herself turned up in a horse-drawn gold carriage and took her place on her throne to read the speech, wearing a huge crown glittering with diamonds.
The theme of this year’s speech was immigration. This was remarkable in a way. Immigration is by no means the most important challenge facing the UK. But, with its economic policies failing and the Conservative Party divided on Europe, the coalition Government has seized on anti-immigrant measures as a populist move.
The centrepiece of these measures on immigration is the revival of one of David Cameron’s favourite measures — the need to deport foreign prisoners and make them serve the sentence in their own country. Cameron proposes to change the law to make this easier. There are over 11,000 foreign inmates in the British penal system and it costs £38,000 to keep someone in jail for a year. So deporting more foreign prisoners is an attractive idea, particularly when the Government has to make big cuts in public expenditure.
This is an issue of particular interest to Jamaica because the country tops the league table of foreign nationalities in prison in England and Wales. The figure varies, but it sometimes touches 1,000 men and women altogether. And the number of Jamaicans in British prisons is more than twice that of much bigger countries like Pakistan.
The trouble is that Cameron has raised this issue before and achieved little. He first promised to send thousands of foreign convicts home in 2010. Since then, fewer than 100 have actually been deported mid-sentence, and none whatsoever to Jamaica. There are a number of difficulties. The main problem is that most prisoner-swap arrangements with other countries need the prisoner to agree.
Understandably, Jamaicans prefer to serve their sentence in the British system, which, overall, has higher standards than Jamaican jails. The Government has tried offering cash incentives to prisoners, if they agree to go home part of the way through their sentence. But this does not seem to have had much effect. There has even been talk of helping fund new prisons in Jamaica and Nigeria, but this does not seem to have materialised.
Cameron talks about renegotiating prisoner-swap arrangements. But there is no evidence that Jamaican politicians are willing to do this. The same also appears to be the case in Nigeria, which has the second highest tally of nationals in British jails. It may be that Cameron thinks he can bring further pressure on the Jamaican Government in this regard. Possibly he thinks that he could force the Jamaican Government to renegotiate prisoner-swap arrangements, meaning that prisoners could be deported back to Jamaica to serve their sentence without their consent. But even then, such prisoners could promptly take a court case against the British under human rights legislation.
So, for all his big talk about deporting foreign prisoners, there does not seem to be much that Cameron can actually do. So, like the other anti-immigrant measures in the Government programme, this proposal appears to be more for show than anything else. It is regrettable that this Government is choosing to play politics with the immigration issue. But, if they cannot even achieve anything on the issues that they are whipping up public fears on, then that makes matters worse.
— Diane Abbott is a British Labour party MP and spokeswoman on public health
