SAJID Javid, who yesterday became Britain’s 116th home secretary, has a “dreadful record on migration” and has “consistently supported Theresa May’s hostile environment”, according to political opponents.
During his eight-year stint as an MP, he backed the Government’s controversial Immigration Act of 2014, and supported “right to rent” measures, where landlords have to check immigration papers of tenants.
READ MORE: May must accept blame for 'toxic immigration policies', say SNP
The Home Office’s own research suggests this causes discrimination against black and ethnic minority tenants.
He’s also in favour of immigration checks for those wanting to open bank accounts.
Javid, who once previously said there is “nothing racist about managed migration”, has also opposed measures which would have banned the detention of pregnant women for immigration reasons.
Green Party co-leader Caroline Lucas: “Sajid Javid comes into this job with a dreadful record on migration.
READ MORE: Tory immigration policy has failed – we need to attract foreign workers
“Not only has he consistently supported Theresa May’s hostile environment, but he’s also consistently voted against a right to remain for EU nationals already in living in the UK.”
The British-Pakistani politician has had a stellar rise since first being elected to represent the safe Tory seat of Bromsgrove in Worcestershire in 2010, and it’s a watershed moment in British politics that one of the great four offices of state is, for the first time in history, held by someone who isn’t white.
His father, Abdul Ghani-Javid, arrived in the UK in the early sixties, 13 years after his family lost everything in India’s partition. He had a pound to his name, and took work in cotton mills, and, famously, on the buses, before opening a clothes shop in Rochdale.
READ MORE: UK should aim for the same ‘hospitable environment’ we have in Scotland
The new Home Secretary has been a lifelong Tory, and a devotee of Margaret Thatcher, though in 1990 he went to the party’s conference to protest the government’s decision to join the exchange rate mechanism.
Despite being a Eurosceptic, in the 2016 referendum he, reluctantly, backed a remain vote. He has, however, in the years since, expressed an enthusiasm for Brexit.
A 20-year-long career in banking – he was the former head of credit trading at Deutsche Bank – left him rich, with unconfirmed reports suggesting he made up to £3 million a year.
The Evening Standard estimated that his election as an MP had required him to take a 98 per cent pay cut.
Months after becoming an MP he was appointed to be George Osborne’s parliamentary private secretary.
He spent 18 months as a Treasury minister, before becoming culture minister in 2014.
David Cameron made him business secretary in 2015.
Under the May Government he was pushed to the housing brief, a portfolio that thrust the MP into the limelight after the Grenfell tragedy and the Government’s almost universally derided response.
He’s been accused of stalling on promises to the victims’ families, and recently he confessed a promise to permanently rehouse within a year all those made homeless would likely be broken.
Javid was the first Tory cabinet minister to speak out about the Windrush scandal.
Over the weekend, he told the Sunday Telegraph: “I thought that could be my mum … my dad … my uncle … it could be me.”
That almost certainly added to the pressure on Amber Rudd to resign.
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