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UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd has resigned over the Windrush scandal

Theresa May said she accepted her resignation this evening.
Windrush generation immigration controversyHome Secretary Amber RuddSource: PA

UK PRIME MINISTER Theresa May has accepted the resignation of her Home Secretary Amber Rudd this evening.

Downing Street confirmed the development with a No 10 spokesman telling the BBC: "The Prime Minister has tonight accepted the resignation of the Home Secretary."

Rudd telephoned May to inform her of her decision in response to the continuing controversy over the treatment of the so-called Windrush generation in Great Britain.

It had emerged in the past 24 hours that she may have misled a committee of MPs over whether her department had targets for removing a certain amount of illegal immigrants from the country over a given period of time.

The Guardian published a memo from Rudd to May which outlined how she had an “aim of increasing the number of enforced removals by more than 10% over the next few years”. She had told the home affairs select committee that her department did not work off targets.

Earlier this month, May's government was forced into a climbdown and apology over threats to deport Caribbean-born citizens who were granted the right to live and work in Britain after the Second World War.

The so-called Windrush generation began arriving in the UK from Commonwealth countries in 1948 to help rebuild the country after the Second World War, and were given indefinite leave to remain. Having lost hundreds of thousands of people, particularly working-aged men, during the war, the country needed labour and the Commonwealth provided the answer.

Because many were born in countries that were still colonies, they were legally British and granted leave to stay indefinitely.

While most lived without incident for decades, recent focus on immigration by Rudd's department changed that. In recent years, since a 2012 law change, a government clampdown on illegal immigration has begun to identify those without papers – scooping up many elderly people from the Windrush generation.

Numerous cases have been highlighted where those who lack the proper documents were told they need evidence to continue working, get NHS treatment or even remain in the UK.

At a meeting on 17 April, May told representatives of the 12 Caribbean members of the Commonwealth that she took the treatment of the Windrush generation “very seriously”.

“I want to apologise to you today. Because we are genuinely sorry for any anxiety that has been caused," she said.

“I want to dispel any impression that my government is in some sense clamping down on Commonwealth citizens, particularly those from the Caribbean.”

With reporting by Paul Hosford 

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    Mute Gerald Kelleher
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    Aug 7th 2024, 5:39 PM

    ‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life’ Darwin

    The Origin of Species arrived a year before that prejudice conviction. In it, Wallace compared famine conditions in Ireland with the largest empire the world had known, in this case, industrial England.

    All the attempts to make it a false 20th-century American variant of science versus religion variant will fail as it is an opportunity to undo Victorian natural selection prejudice from the minds and education of humanity based on ‘races’.

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    Mute Square
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    Aug 7th 2024, 6:12 PM

    @Gerald Kelleher: what

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    Mute Gerald Kelleher
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    Aug 7th 2024, 7:06 PM

    The million who died on this island due to the conviction of Malthus as an antecedent for natural selection is purposely ignored by these fact checkers.

    The intermediaries or ‘missing link’ between white complexion humans and gorillas were African and Australian natives and hope for their extermination.

    “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.” — Charles Darwin (1871)

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    Aug 7th 2024, 7:31 PM

    @Gerald Kelleher: You need to get out more lovely hair do

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    Aug 7th 2024, 10:10 PM

    @Square: looks like he’s off his meds again

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