UPDATE: From BBC

Amber Rudd resigns as home secretary

The home secretary Amber Rudd has resigned, saying she “inadvertently misled” MPs over targets for removing illegal immigrants.

Ms Rudd, who was due to make a Commons statement on Monday, was under pressure to quit over the Windrush scandal.

She faced criticism over the existence of Home Office removals targets and her knowledge of them.

Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott, who had repeatedly urged Ms Rudd to go, said she had “done the right thing”.

Ms Abbott added that the “architect of this crisis” – Theresa May – must come before the Commons to explain “whether she knew that Amber Rudd was misleading Parliament and the public last week”.

On Sunday, the Guardian published the full letter it had reported on a week earlier, in which Ms Rudd set out her “ambitious but deliverable” aim to deport 10% more illegal immigrants over the “next few years” to Theresa May.

Ms Rudd telephoned the prime minister on Sunday evening to tell her of the decision amid intensifying opposition demands for her to quit.

For more: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-43944988

Original story:

Amber Rudd finds herself in a hostile environment

From The Economist

The home secretary is damaged by the Windrush scandal—but not fatally

LAST November the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) held a drinks party to fete the younger generation of Tory MPs. The message was simple: far from being the zombified and lobotomised monstrosity that it appeared, the Conservative Party was, in fact, busily renewing itself, thanks to a new generation of MPs drawn from a wide range of backgrounds and fizzing with ideas. The star of the show was the home secretary, Amber Rudd.

The choice of Ms Rudd was significant for both chronological and ideological reasons. Chronologically, she represented a link between the establishment and the new generation. Ideologically, she represented a unifying force in a divided party. Here was Margaret Thatcher’s favourite think-tank championing the leader of the Remain faction in the cabinet. Lord Saatchi, the CPS’s chairman, introduced Ms Rudd by reading a list of five home secretaries who had gone on to become prime minister.

Today Ms Rudd is fighting for her political life, thanks to the abysmal treatment of the “Windrush generation”, Caribbean migrants who came to Britain in 1948-71, who have recently been harassed in innumerable ways (including being threatened with deportation) because they can’t produce paperwork to prove they are British citizens. Labour has called for Ms Rudd to resign. She faced blistering questioning from a parliamentary committee on April 25th about the Windrush affair, and what it says about Britain’s treatment of immigrants.

Windrush is only the latest—if by far the most serious—in a succession of setbacks for the home secretary. Britain has seen a surge in knife crime and acid attacks. In February and March London’s murder rate briefly exceeded New York City’s. The Conservative right has added its voice to Ms Rudd’s Labour critics. Fraser Nelson, the editor of the pro-Brexit Spectator, has criticised liberal Tories such as Ms Rudd for misinterpreting Brexit as a vote for closing the borders rather than embracing a more global future. Peter Oborne, a Daily Mail columnist, has accused her of being overpromoted—she became home secretary after only six years in Parliament—and unpatriotic to boot.

How badly damaged is she? Probably not fatally, unless there is another scandal festering in the Home Office’s basement. Ms Rudd has tarnished her reputation with her handling of the Windrush disaster. She blamed her underlings at the Home Office, which was hardly statesmanlike. Her statement to the House of Commons that she found the cases “heartbreaking” provoked a stinging response from Amelia Gentleman, the Guardian journalist who broke the story: why, then, had the home secretary delivered nothing but pro forma answers when the paper contacted her about those very cases almost every week for the past six months? In 2016 Ms Rudd also horrified her friends on the Conservative Party’s left by demanding that employers publish lists of their foreign-born employees. But for all that, her primary sin is administering—or perhaps mis-administering—a policy that she inherited from her predecessor.

The principal architect of the Windrush mess, in so far as there is an architect, is Ms Rudd’s boss, Theresa May. Mrs May not only developed the “hostile environment” policy that was meant to discourage illegal immigrants from staying in the country. She also pursued David Cameron’s target of reducing immigration to the tens of thousands, with a determination worthy of Inspector Javert in Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables”. She insists that students should be included in the numbers, despite the opposition of almost everyone else in the cabinet, including Ms Rudd.

Even more than the Maybot’s rigidity, the policy was driven by Britain’s deep ambivalence about both immigration and identity documents. Under New Labour Britain pursued one of the most liberal immigration policies in the world, opening its doors to eastern Europeans after 2004. It then slammed the doors shut. Britain is one of only a handful of EU countries that do not require people to have ID cards. But at the same time it is increasingly demanding that people who receive the benefits of the welfare state should be able to prove they are in the country legally. Windrush is the product not of racism, but of the collision between the demands of the bureaucratic state and Britain’s commitment to ancestral rights.

Ms Rudd is fortunate in that her strengths outweigh her weaknesses, making her unusual in the current cabinet. She is a natural member of Britain’s officer class, devoid of clever ideas but just the sort of person you need to keep the show on the road. She also has flashes of star power. During the referendum debate she skewered Boris Johnson by describing him as “not the man you want driving you home at the end of the evening”. And her pro-European views make her hard to sack. Removing her would upset the most important balance in politics.

Trial by fire
This is not to say that Ms Rudd will be able to relax any time soon. The Windrush scandal continues to metastasise, recently ensnaring citizens from other Commonwealth countries, including Canada. It also raises thorny questions of both competence and culture. Why should EU citizens think that they will be spared the Home Office’s bureaucratic ineptitude after Brexit? And why should members of ethnic minorities trust the Tories again? The Tories are rapidly losing their claim to be the party of law and order, as Labour blames them for cutting police numbers by some 20,000 since 2010. Ms Rudd is fighting to shore up a minuscule majority in her Hastings and Rye constituency, making her acutely sensitive to public opinion. All of this will test her like never before. But that is surely no bad thing in somebody who aspires to the top job. Ms Rudd’s former husband, A.A. Gill, used to refer to her as “the Silver Spoon” because of her privileged background. Britain will soon discover whether the Silver Spoon is in fact made of steel.

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “A hostile environment”

For more on this story go to: https://www.economist.com/news/britain/21741165-home-secretary-damaged-windrush-scandalbut-not-fatally-amber-rudd-finds-herself