Never forget this

I read an article yesterday that reminded me of the 2013 British Home Office campaign to “encourage” people to leave Britain voluntarily. This involved placing newspaper advertisements warning people of dire consequences if they stayed in the country illegally.

It also involved sending this van around 6 London boroughs, especially designed to spread discord and frighten people.

According to the Guardian, in October 2013,

The mobile billboard vans toured six London boroughs between 22 July and 22 August as part of a wider advertising campaign to encourage illegal immigrants to leave the UK. The vans drew widespread criticism, including claims that May was “borrowing the language of the 1970s National Front”. Critics included the Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, and Liberal Democrat cabinet ministers.

The wider Home Office summer immigration enforcement campaign, Operation Vaken, included placing adverts in eight minority ethnic newspapers, postcards in shop windows, and leaflets and posters advertising immigration surgeries in buildings used by faith and charity groups.

The official evaluation report says that in total 60 people have left the UK voluntarily as a result of the campaign, with a further 65 cases currently in progress. Only 11 people left as a direct result of the van adverts and a further seven after seeing reports of the vans in the media or online.

Currently, various people label this as the beginning of the “hostile” climate that had led the Home Office to make many people’s lives hell for the last few years; the so-called Windrush generation who arrived from the Caribbean as children, and lived all their lives working in Britain, until they learned that they did not possess the right papers to stay.

Things like this make me happy to live in Finland.