This is an exaggeration*. The truth is horrible enough that it doesn’t need exaggerating. I haven’t seen the story covered elsewhere on Boing Boing, so here’s a potted summary:
Historically, people from what are now Commonwealth countries had the same right to live and work in Britain as British nationals, originally because they were British nationals (British subjects, and later “citizens of the United Kingdoms and colonies”) and later, as the various parts of the Empire gained independence, under the concept of a common Commonwealth citizenship (not too dissimilar to modern European Union citizenship).
This right got scaled further and further back; but it remains the case that if you are a national of a Commonwealth country who arrived in Britain as a child before 1973 and have lived here ever since, you have an unconditional right to remain.
Under the “hostile environment” dreamed up by the Home Secretary before Rudd, the Home Office began to aggressively question the right of the “Windrush generation” (named after the ship that brought the first wave of immigrants from the Caribbean in 1948) to be here. People who’d lived, worked and paid taxes in the UK for 45 years or more, and who much of the time assumed they were British, were suddenly faced with a loss of benefits, loss of employment, loss of their homes, and the threat of deportation to countries they could barely remember, unless they could provide four pieces of documentary evidence of their residence for every year they’d been here.
Four pieces of evidence. Per year. For forty. Fucking. Years.
Naturally, income tax and national insurance records didn’t count.
Where the Government erred, however, was in assuming that the British public wouldn’t give a shit about black pensioners being thrown out of their jobs, their homes and the country (and in one case being denied treatment for his cancer unless he could come up with £54,000). There was an outcry, spearheaded in no small part by the Guardian’s laudable efforts in exposing the whole sordid affair. But it still took six months for the Government to acknowledge that it had gone a teensy bit too far, and even then it tried to blame it on over-zealous officials going off piste.
Even that wasn’t enough to bring down Rudd, though. She was finally done for by telling Parliament that as far as she knew the Home Office had no targets for deporting people, when documentary evidence showed that either she was fibbing or, if she really didn’t know, she damn well should have done.
General consensus is that she could only hold on for as long as she did because she was acting as a human shield for her predecessor, the one who was really responsible for the shit show: the Right Honorable Theresa May, First Lord of the Treasury and Prime Minister.
* ETA: wrong word (see @L0ki’s comment down thread).
