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I've just responded to the Earned Settlement consultation. It closes tonight. The whole idea is dreadful but what stuck with me most is the gross arrogance of the whole exercise. A (cross) thread 🧵

We begin with the Home Secretary's foreword, which is something else. She opens with her own family's migration story, declares herself a patriot, then lays out a system designed to keep people like her parents in constant limbo for a decade or more. The lack of self-awareness is kinda mindblowing.

The first pillar is "Character". But what the policy actually measures is criminal records, English, and earnings. Those are things you can observe: character is not. Character is morals, resilience, humaniness, the capacity for growth. The state cannot assess it and shouldn't pretend to try.

The word is revealing and it matters. If you tell people this is about "character" you're saying those who fail it are deficient as human beings. Not that they didn't meet a practical requirement: that they weren't a good enough person. Who do they think they are, to presume to say such a thing?

Across the whole thing, they mistake measurability for meaning. A person who's raised kids here, made friends, participated in local life is integrated whether or not they can pass a (fatuous) multiple choice exam. Real integration is lived and worked, but lived things don't fit on forms. Don't try!

And then there are the children. A child brought here at 3 whose parents face a 15-year wait could grow up entirely in this country and still face years of uncertainty about whether they can stay. Children don't choose to migrate. Treating such a child's belonging as provisional is terribly cruel.

Instead we have one that starts from suspicion. Settlement should be a sensible process of integration that recognises a migrant's future as being here: but under this policy it's a hostile, exclusionary, decade-long++ trial. It presumes that a bureaucracy can judge who deserves to belong. It can't.

Here's a word I don't use often: shameful. But this policy is shameful. I'm ashamed that my government has proposed it. It's arrogant, it's cruel, it won't work in any meaningful way, but it will make our country a worse place. Please respond (before midnight). It's so, so bad gov.uk/government/c...

ETA: I forgot to mention one of the worst things - that it's retrospective, and will apply to people already here, already working towards settlement but not there yet. People who've moved here, put down roots - only to have this government yank them out. An extraordinary breach of faith. Awful.

Interestingly, I went to look at the survey and got a message saying it had expired - 5 hours before the official deadline