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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Comment
Kenan Malik

What makes a very British miscarriage of justice? Contempt for the ‘little people’

Theresa May ignored warnings that her ‘hostile environment’ policy risked making life intolerable for anyone ‘foreign looking’. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

‘It was a scandal hiding in plain sight.” “The result of a series of choices, the sum of state neglect and corporate wrongdoing.” “Most assumed that they had been caught up in a bureaucratic tangle; few guessed that thousands of others were experiencing the same difficulties.” “It is a peculiar sensation, telling the truth repeatedly and being repeatedly told you are lying.” “Our representatives chose time and again not to act on mounting evidence.” “This is a story about who gets listened to in Britain and who gets ignored.”

These could be quotes from an article about the Post Office scandal. All are, in fact, taken from Show Me the Bodies, Peter Apps’s harrowing account of the Grenfell fire, and The Windrush Betrayal, Amelia Gentleman’s unsparing investigation into the human consequences of Theresa May’s “hostile environment” policies.

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