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.

Certainly children did not need to register as British in some way. They lived their lives as the rest of the population – until, that is, the arrival of the hostile environment policy and ever more stringent demands for paperwork. Hence the scandal and the entirely unnecessary suffering inflicted inflicted by state agencies.

There is no justification, in law or natural law, for the forcible deportation of people to a place they have perhaps never or rarely visited, and to which they have immediate practical connection. It is cruel to expect anyone to start a new life in Jamaica or any other nation, particularly one in which they may not be made to feel very welcome. It is an obvious abuse of their human rights, and human rights are universal. That is the point of human rights: they are not there to be bestowed by a beneficent state in those who are deemed deserving.

Nor even are some of those being summarily removed guilty of the kind of very serious crimes for which the process is usually intended. But even if they were guilty of heinous offences, they should still not be deported until their citizenship is settled. The presumption must be that their uncertain status is purely a result of the confusions created by the Windrush scandal, rather than because they arrived in Britain decades ago illegally.

It is the precautionary principle applied to human beings who, like anyone whatever their wrongdoings, should be treated in a civilised way. If not then the government will find itself having to pay them large sums of taxpayers’ money in compensation. It is an unholy mess, and will only be made far worse if a plane full of de facto British citizens takes off for the Caribbean.