Be careful of toxic language

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” ~Maya Angelou

For the last several years the UK government has operated their immigration policy under a two-word term: “Hostile Environment”.

This started out as being designed to make it difficult for those in the UK illegally to stay, but very quickly became an amplifier for the still heavily entrenched institutional racism still present in this country, impacting literally millions of people contributing to society.

Over the holiday season, the UK Government showed with a very simple choice of toxic words in a tweet how deeply embedded the doctrine and culture of Hostile Environment has become.

If the opposite of #BeautifulLeadership is Ugly Leadership, I see this in first-hand stories from across the UK time after time under the doctrine of Hostile Environment.

As Maya Angelou famously said:

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

After the Windrush scandal burst into the public domain around April 2018, the champion of Hostile Environment, Prime Minister Theresa May herself, sent a tweet in August to congratulate Jamaica on the day of their independence day celebrations. Suffice to say the response from all the Jamaican and broader Caribbean…