Director – Sonita Gale – 2021 – UK – Cert. 12a – 98m
**1/2
A documentary about the UK’s anti-immigrant Hostile Environment policy includes a brief history plus stories of both those it affected and a charity set up to help them – out in cinemas on Friday, January 21st, local screening details constantly being added here
The eponymous adjective refers to the UK’s attitude to immigrants since 2012: the so-called Hostile Environment. Make Britain an unpleasant enough place for immigrants, and they’ll leave.
Gale’s film has three main plot strands. The first follows the Sair family, from Pakistan, resident in the UK since 2003. The second follows the fortunes of the Community Response Kitchen, a non-profit organisation set up to feed low paid workers in the London Borough of Brent. The third is a brief history of anti-immigration rhetoric and policy in the UK. Further material includes interviews with Windrush generation Brit Anthony Bryan and MP Stephen Timms, among others.
The story of the Sairs makes for depressing viewing. In 2003, Farrukh Sair married Saba in Pakistan. Four months later, the couple moved to the UK on a student visa to do a course. Today, they have a family, kids who have spent their entire lives in the UK. He has applied to the UK’s Home Office four times in recent years for his family to be officially recognised as British, for which privilege he is charged a considerable sum of money each time, only to be turned down after a long wait during which time hear hears and can find out nothing.
It often seems to Farrukh (and to an outsider like myself listening to his testimony) that any grounds for such rejections are based on technicalities: the Home Office is often going to ultimately say no, and then find (so-called) ‘reasons’ to back that up. On one occasion, it admitted that the legal reason it had rejected his claim was inadmissible, then promptly inserted another reason to justify the rejection. On a later application, the inadmissible reason was redeployed as grounds for objection. Additionally, such applicants are effectively cash cows netting the UK government considerable sums of money out of all proportion to any service provided (even if an application were to be successful).
The Community Response Kitchen was set up by Daksha Varsani and Paresh Jethwa as an independent project in the London Borough Of Brent. Sadly, Gale and her camera weren’t present when the project was initially set up to help NHS staff during the pandemic as they worked all hours at a critical unit – she comes in when they are up and running as an operation cooking and delivering hot meals to those that need them, a wider client base than the originally targeted NHS staff. A local business donates free use of its premises for a few years, but CRK do what they do without any funding from government.
Gale follows the story, sees the organisation doing considerable good and meeting a need which shouldn’t be there – Britain, after all, is one of the world’s richest countries so it seems inexcusable that some of its poorest and most vulnerable should be on the breadline – and then, heartbreakingly, watches it collapses as a going concern when the donor needs their premises back and no other suitable replacement can be found. The final insult is a Points Of Light award from HM Government recognising the organisation’s invaluable contribution to UK society without either making any attempt to find new premises to enable their work to continue or providing funding to help them sort that out.
Finally, interwoven with all this, is a potted history of UK immigration policy from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. This is introduced by a passionate speech by Labour MP David Lammy (also excerpted in the trailer) about the harm of the Windrush Scandal being inevitably caused by the Hostile Environment policy. One would imagine Lammy as one of the UK’s black MPs would have a great deal more to say on this matter but, for whatever reason, no footage is forthcoming. There is, however, a great deal of footage of another Labour MP, the equally articulate Stephen Timms, a tireless campaigner against the Hostile Environment policy.
The historical line the film takes on all this runs from the post-war invitation of Commonwealth citizens to come to Britain in the late 1940s (known as the Windrush generation after the ship the Empire Windrush which brought the first 500 Caribbeans) to do the jobs many indigenous Brits wouldn’t do, working in the NHS, on the buses, and so forth… through MP Enoch Powell’s notorious 1968 Rivers Of Blood speech against non-whites (basically suggesting Britain was for white people and anyone else should go back to their own countries)… through New Labour’s introduction in 1999 under PM Tony Blair of No Recourse To Public Funds (NRPF) for immigrants to the UK which, this documentary claims, put in place the architecture necessary for what was to follow.
It goes on to talk about Conservative PM David Cameron’s “benefit tourism” rhetoric from 2012 onwards and his government’s introduction of the Hostile Environment policy before going on to mention both Boris Johnson (as a PM promising to find out facts then failing to to so) and his Home Secretary Priti Patel, whose anti-immigration rhetoric seems to disregard the fact that if her policies had been in place at the time, it’s unlikely her own, Indian-born parents would have been allowed to settle in Britain and build a life for themselves.
Somewhat incredibly and in something of a major gaffe, there is no mention in the film of Cameron’s Home Secretary Theresa May, the person more than any other responsible for the Hostile Environment policy, which as previously mentioned can be summed up as making Britain such an unpleasant place for immigrants that they eventually leave of their own accord. May went on to become Prime Minister following the Brexit debacle. The Hostile Environment is her legacy. The film contains disturbing stories of people being deported because they didn’t have the paperwork to prove their British citizenship (often because it had been previously destroyed by the Home Office), or of protests to prevent cases of deportation, but the specific material on exactly how all this came to pass and Theresa May’s role in all this is unaccountably missing.
In short, while the UK’s Hostile Environment policy remains a genuine national scandal of recent years, this documentary on the subject – while its heart may be in the right place – undercuts its own value as a discussion starter by foolishly omitting a key element from its version of the historical record. That’s a tragedy, because a documentary shining light on this iniquitous policy is sorely needed to further the debate and resolve the issues.
Hostile is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, January 21st, local screening details constantly being added here.
Trailer: