Expelling legal migrants is a move straight from the Idi Amin playbook

This latest Tory plan for expulsions opens the door to curtailing the rights of us all

- Kenan Malik

Enoch Powell supporters demonstrate against the arrival of Ugandan Asians in the UK in 1972. Evening Standard/Getty

(Evening Standard/Getty)

Forget “Enoch was right”. Conservative politicians now seem to believe that “Idi Amin was right”. Conservative MP Katie Lam, touted as a future Tory leader, told the Sunday Times last week that she would deport not just all “illegal immigrants” but many legal migrants, too, who “shouldn't have been able to” settle here in the first place. These are mainly people granted “indefinite leave to remain” (ILR) or permanent residency.

The forcible deportation of legal migrants is necessary, she insists, to make Britain “culturally coherent”.

The Sunday Times described this as “unsentimental toughness”. It is something far uglier, taking us, as Rob Ford, professor of politics at Manchester University, put it, into “Idi Amin territory”.

In August 1972, Amin, Uganda’s president, ordered the expulsion of the country’s Indian minority who had not obtained Ugandan citizenship. Many had been settled in Uganda since the 19th century. It was the culmination of the policy of “Africanisation” begun by Amin’s predecessor, Milton Obote, who was ousted by Amin in a military coup.

Amin accused Ugandan Asians of sabotaging the nation’s economy and of failing to integrate. It is “your refusal to integrate with the Africans in this country”, he told Indians, that has created hostile “feeling towards you”. Hear the echoes?