Earlier this month, Theresa May, former home secretary and prime minister, announced that she would stand down as MP at the next general election. This news was met with video compilations of career highs and lows – Brexit, the 2017 snap election, and awkward dancing – and tributes praising her “decency, integrity” and “passionate campaigning for vital causes”.
That’s not how I will remember her. To me and many others in migrant communities and the migrants’ rights sector, she will be remembered for four acts that demonstrated her fundamental lack of humanity.
She was the home secretary who failed the Windrush generation, who didn't meet the survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire, who created the hostile environment for migrants, and who changed the overseas domestic workers visa to tie workers to their employers. All cruel, all the opposite of “decency”. And the last two made countless migrants vulnerable to exploitation, in direct contradiction to May’s professed passion for ending modern slavery.
