Weekly Update – Friday 13th August 2021

The Home Office’s Cruel Mass Deportations

In last week’s update I spoke about the Home Office’s plans for a mass deportation flight to Jamaica. The Government’s original plan was to have ninety people on the plane but thanks to the vital work of organisations such as Movement for Justice and Detention Action, dozens were granted a reprieve. Sadly, in the early hours of Wednesday morning, my constituent Hugh was one of the seven people on board the chartered flight to Jamaica.

Hugh’s case clearly lays bare the cruelty and callousness of the Home Office’s immigration regime. He is 64 years-old and has made the UK his home for most of his life. He was earmarked for removal by the Home Office partly on the basis that ‘he had no British children’, after the tragic death of his young daughter as a result of medical negligence in 2019. Tragically, he will now be separated from his wife and the mother of his child, who is herself a member of the Windrush generation.

Priti Patel cannot seriously expect us to believe that the reason Hugh was deported from the UK is to ‘keep the public safe’ as she puts it. It is quite clear that the real motive is to pander to the right-wing press and other racist elements within the UK. Hugh had committed one non-violent offence for which he had already served his time, and it is simply wrong that we have a two-tiered criminal justice system whereby migrants are punished twice for their crimes with their immigration status always being held in reserve as an additional punishment.

GCSE and A-Level Results

I would like to extend my congratulations to everyone who received their A-Level and GCSE results this week, achieved after a very testing couple of years for those in education. However, we have sadly seen educational inequality soar over the last eighteen months, significantly due to the Government’s failure to swiftly roll out laptops and internet data in the quantity required to students in need, and this is reflected in the results.

The data is damning. For A-Level results, whilst the number of A grades increased across the board, this increase was 50% higher amongst private school students than for those at comprehensives, and more than double the increase seen at Sixth Form Colleges. While the gap has also widened between Black students, those who live in areas of high deprivation and those on free school meals compared to their peers. As regards GCSE results, only 14% of students on free school meals achieved a Level 7 or above, making these pupils less than half as likely to achieve the top grade as their peers, a gap that has increased by almost a third since 2019.

This is an indictment of the Government’s refusal in June to fund the £15 billion catch-up package of support which was recommended by their own education recovery tsar, Sir Kevan Collins, which resulted in his resignation. Education Secretary Gavin Williamson long ago lost the confidence of students, teachers, parents and guardians and the only honorable thing for him to do at this point would be to resign. If the Government was serious tackling inequality it would pledge far more than the paltry £1.4 billion that has been announced, working out at £50 per head. We should be following the examples of the USA and the Netherlands who have pledged £1600 and £2500 per pupil respectively to their post-COVID educational catch up.

Climate Emergency

This week has seen the publication of the first section of an important three-part report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report states that human activities have already caused 1C of global warming and 1.5C is effectively already baked in, with ‘immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions necessary’ to restrict it to this level of increase. Already, this 1.5C increase is the difference between extreme heatwaves occurring every 5 years rather than every 50 before the impact of global heating.

Sadly, the Government’s rhetoric ahead of the COP 26 Climate Change Conference being held in Glasgow later this year, is not being matched by concrete action, as is shown by the Government’s willingness to allow the development of the new Cambo oil field west of the Shetland Islands. The absolute minimum goal the world should be aiming for is the halving of emissions by 2030, otherwise we face catastrophe of 2C of warming or more.

Any Government serious about a just green transition would be investing heavily to enact these changes which have the potential to create many jobs, whether that is in the manufacturing of the components needed for green technologies or in retrofitting homes to make them more energy efficient. The unemployment rate in Edmonton currently sits at 11.2% and communities such as ours could hugely benefit from the investment needed to carry out a green transition.

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Thank you for taking the time to read my latest update. If you have any issues that you would like to raise directly with me then please do email edmontonconstituency@parliament.uk. I’m always happy to help whenever possible.

Kind regards,

Kate Osamor MP