Like many civil servants, I joined because of the principles. We work here because we want to serve the public, to make vital services work well, and to help people. I work with dedicated, skilled and compassionate people. We understand that we aren’t the politicians; we just want to get on and make things work for the public.
But at the Home Office, it is unavoidably clear that the things we are now ordered to put into place – from borders to policing to immigration enforcement – are doing real harm to many people. As the report on the historical roots of the Windrush scandal showed, the Home Office has a long and ugly history of structural racism, with UK immigration policy shaped for decades to try to minimise the number of black and minority ethnic people in this country.
So it is little surprise that the barbaric Rwanda transportation plan – to forcibly fly people who have escaped trauma and horror to another continent – is presented to us by senior fellow civil servants as “humanitarian”. The laughably absurd idea that it has anything to do with preventing people smugglers is repeated with a straight face.
If the racial priorities in our work weren’t clear enough from the Windrush scandal, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has rammed the point home. Of course, innocent people bombed out of their homes must be offered help and a place to rebuild their lives if they choose to. Yet this is hardly the only war going on. The difference in response when there are white faces involved couldn’t be more stark. Whole new visa routes were created with vastly more “generous” conditions, such as not being banned from working or accessing vital public funds.
Ukraine, like Covid, has shown some glimpses of how the government can rouse itself to care for people and support lives – but only sometimes. Why has this kind of response never happened for the people in desperate situations in Yemen, Ethiopia, Sudan, Palestine, Afghanistan? Let alone the climate crisis.
Time and again we have seen official leadership so unable to demonstrate basic humanity that those of us in the regular ranks look at each other and shake our heads. Can this really be happening? Is this who we are?
So, we say: enough.
We’re tired of accepting that things have to be this grim. Tired of quietly going along with every new step we are told to take into an ever more controlling, more divided world. We’re sold a beautiful dream of an organisation that has learned from Windrush – “One Home Office” is the name of the department’s transformation programme. But if we really are to become ‘One Home Office’, we need to play our part.
Welcome to “Our Home Office”, a growing network of civil servants employed by the Home Office who take our principles seriously. Such as impartiality and fairness and respecting the rule of law for everyone, and upholding the rights that every person has.
And we are finding ways to put these into practice ourselves. In what we do, and what we resist. In speaking out. In listening in, to voices often disbelieved or ignored. In finding whatever cracks we can in the stifling, inhuman, bureaucratic walls, prising them open to make space to build something better. We speak to colleagues and share our support, we act however openly or subtly we feel we can – from posters reminding colleagues of our true values, to the “Refugees Welcome” stickers we are placing in our buildings. We are trying to find a way to live by and act on our principles.
Maybe, somehow, this hostile environment that entangles all of us can be disarmed, unwound. And we invite our fellow civil servants: which strands will you help untie?
