The review into the Windrush scandal has to be published before any more deportations take place

Editorial: This is a mess that will only get worse if a plane full of de facto British citizens takes off next week

Boris Johnson has said the flight should go ahead (AFP/Getty)

To borrow a phrase, politicians do not get to choose which citizens they serve. No government should be able to deport British people to distant lands because it is administratively and politically convenient to do so. Yet this is precisely what is happening now, a further consequence of the Windrush scandal.

The worst of it is that ministers are trying to pack as many as possible into a plane out of Heathrow before before an official review of this scandal can be published. If this is the way our new “people’s government” is to treat its own people, we all have much to fear.

Former criminals who have served their sentences are now being deported, as is sometimes routine procedure for certain offences with all foreign nationals. Except of course that these descendants of the Windrush generation are in reality as British as anyone else. Coming to the UK as young children, they, like their patents, were part of a generation that arrived in a far less bureaucratic era, one when movement of Commonwealth citizens was easier, and when there was no requirement to acquire a British passport or driving licence if it was not needed.