IN the two weeks since George Floyd’s murder, politicians have rushed to embrace the sentiments behind the Black Lives Matter movement. Even the PM and the Home Secretary have uttered the words on the floor of the House of Commons. But actions speak louder than words and if we want to know just how much black and other minority ethnic lives matter in Tory Britain, we need to take a long hard look at the impact of Tory policies on BAME lives.

Anyone who watched Sitting In Limbo, Monday night’s BBC One dramatisation of the experiences of a member of the Windrush generation, could be left in little doubt that Theresa May’s flagship policy – the hostile environment – is a policy in which black lives most definitely do not matter.

In 1965, at the age of eight, Anthony Bryan came to the UK from Jamaica with his mum. He left school at 16 and worked for almost 40 years paying tax and national insurance. When he applied for a British passport in 2015, immigration enforcement caught up with him and decided he had no right to stay in the country where he had lived and worked for 50 years. He lost his job; he wasn’t allowed to claim benefits and he was detained twice. He was on the verge of deportation to Jamaica, where he hadn’t been since his childhood, when the law and politics finally intervened.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights recovered his file from the Home Office, and we established that it was stuffed full of evidence of his right to live in the UK. We concluded that it was not possible that the Home Office treatment of him had been a mistake, rather that the treatment was systemic.

Bryan is just one of 850 people who were wrongfully detained between 2012 and 2017. Eighty-three members of the Windrush generation were deported despite having a right to live in the UK and at least 13 of these people died before the Home Office acknowledged it had been mistaken in its treatment of them. And guess what – they were all black members of the Afro-Caribbean community. This was no mistake. It was a systemic clear-out with a racial bias.

I have constituents from other Commonwealth countries who have encountered similar problems with the Home Office refusing them a British passport due to a lack of documentation, despite long-time residency in the UK, but none of them was detained or faced deportation. They were white.

Of course, it was a Labour Government which first used the term “hostile environment” in 2007, but boy did Theresa May pick up the ball and run with it. In a state where black lives really mattered the Windrush scandal would have ended her premiership. Instead, Amber Rudd took the fall and two years later only 60 of the 1275 applications for compensation have been paid.

The recommendations of the Windrush Lessons Learned Report, including a review of the hostile environment policy and its impact on race equality, have yet to be implemented despite repeated opposition calls lead by Stuart McDonald MP, the SNP’s immigration spokesperson.

Wendy Williams, who wrote the report, concluded: “While I am unable to make a definitive finding of institutional racism within the department (Home Office), I have serious concerns that these failings demonstrate an institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness towards the issue of race and the history of the Windrush generation within the department, which are consistent with some elements of the definition of institutional racism.”

I believe that those elements of institutional racism are present in other Tory Government policies particularly Home Office policies.

Take for example the “no recourse to public funds” (NRPF) condition imposed on migrants with limited leave to enter or remain in the UK. NRPF means they cannot access benefits, housing or homelessness assistance. The impact of this policy on migrant women who suffer domestic abuse is the last remaining stumbling block to UK ratification of the Istanbul Convention on Violence against Women and Girls.

A REPORT by Agnes Woolley called “Access Denied: The cost of the ‘no recourse to public funds’ policy”, found that most families with NRPF have a child who is British by birth and nearly all of these families are BAME. Therefore, NRPF is inherently more likely to affect BAME British children than white British children. Despite this clear evidence that NRPF is a policy with racially discriminatory impacts, the Home Secretary refuses to act.

SNP MPs will keep pressing her to do so, and we continue to be at the forefront of fighting these racist polices at Westminster.

However, the SNP, like all political parties, needs to do much more to address the concerns of BAME communities and to improve their representation among our elected representatives.

On Monday night I took part in a hugely oversubscribed Zoom call organised by Anne McLaughlin MP, the SNP Women and Equalities Spokesperson at Westminster, and councillor Graham Campbell. More than 80 members of the BAME community in Scotland and 40 SNP MPs, MSPs and councillors signed up. The purpose of the call was for the politicians to listen to stories of what it is like to be black and Asian in Scotland, and we did.

One of my big take-aways was that we need to do more to encourage members of the BAME community, particularly women, to stand for election. To date, the SNP have only ever had one female BAME parliamentarian and Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh’s experiences of racist abuse should shame us all.

Across Scotland there are fantastic grassroots organisations like Score Scotland, based in Wester Hailes in my constituency, working hard to address the causes and effects of racism and to promote race equality. Their aim is to break down the barriers to the full participation of minority ethnic communities in all aspects of civic life. Politicians must work in partnership with such organisations to realise their goals and to give the words Black Lives Matter true meaning in our communities.