Tory ministers milking the system are the real shirkers

If I were editing a tabloid newspaper this week – and I’m always open to guest stints – I would have had advertising vans out since Monday. They would have been crawling v-e-r-y slowly back and forth past the houses of Theresa May, Amber Rudd, Nick Timothy and David Cameron – and those just for starters. Instead of the repulsive GO HOME message that adorned the infamous vans May’s Home Office sent out, which resulted in the eventual deportation of precisely 11 migrants, I would have something along the lines of STAY HOME. Stay home, permanently.

Whether they would get the message is uncertain. Collectively, Britain did its very best to provide a hostile environment for May with the election result. The message was very clear: take a hike. Not a hiking holiday, but the full hike.

Who are the Windrush generation?

They are people who arrived in the UK after the second world war from Caribbean countries at the invitation of the British government. The first group arrived on the ship MV Empire Windrush in June 1948.

What is happening to them?

An estimated 50,000 people face the risk of deportation if they never formalised their residency status and do not have the required documentation to prove it.

Why is this happening now?

It stems from a policy, set out by Theresa May when she was home secretary, to make the UK 'a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants'. It requires employers, NHS staff, private landlords and other bodies to demand evidence of people’s citizenship or immigration status.

Why do they not have the correct paperwork and status?

Some children, often travelling on their parents’ passports, were never formally naturalised and many moved to the UK before the countries in which they were born became independent, so they assumed they were British. In some cases, they did not apply for passports. The Home Office did not keep a record of people entering the country and granted leave to remain, which was conferred on anyone living continuously in the country since before 1 January 1973.

What is the government doing to resolve the problem?

On Monday, the home secretary Amber Rudd announced the creation of a new Home Office team dedicated to ensuring that Commonwealth-born long-term UK residents would no longer find themselves classified as being in the UK illegally.

Yet the import does not seem to have got through to the prime minister, or the various arse-coverers around her. It’s fair to say we are dealing with a very specific class of unworthy here. There are few groups who take less responsibility for their actions, as this week in the Windrush scandal has laid starkly bare. Some of the most senior political figures in the land are – in the purest sense of one of their favourite terms – shirkers. They are feckless. They act like these things are happening to them, as opposed to because of them. Given the judgments they like to visit on the weaker members of society for comparatively minuscule transgressions, this makes them the most raging hypocrites too.

In the Home Office, Amber Rudd can’t even commit to a personal pronoun. “I am concerned that the Home Office has become too concerned with policy and strategy, and sometimes loses sight of the individual,” was the verdict of the specific individual who is the actual home secretary, and who was clearly very much wishing people would lose sight of her. Complete tools always blame their workmen, and the civil servants union chief has now come out to imply this of Rudd.

In No 10 Rudd’s Home Office predecessor still, bogglingly, resists any personal blame. In one of his newspaper columns, May’s former chief of staff, Nick Timothy, claims – wrongly – that May was against the vans and was on holiday or something, while referring to the “so-called hostile environment policy” when it was literally called so by him and his boss. Meanwhile David Cameron – in pursuit of whose ludicrous back-of-a-napkin immigration targets all this was done – disembarked from the gravy train momentarily this week to ignore the subject entirely in a CNN interview.

And on they all go. If the government is in any doubt as to why so many millions think it’s one rule for them and another for the little people, then this week couldn’t be a better primer. You lose one form and you lose your job, your cancer treatment, your benefits, your liberty; you lose a generation’s forms and you’re the effing prime minister. Those condemned to battle the systems that ministers design know what happens if they make tiny errors. Furthermore, they know that if they messed up a tenth as badly in their jobs, they’d be sacked. But in the arse-over-tit world of government, you’re safe because your sacking would make the big boss – May – look weak. Just like your HR department, right? Except on crystal meth.

I don’t want to fall back on a series of politicians’ best-loved cliches, but this level of irresponsibility is just scrounging with a red box. They play for high stakes – but never their own. It’s the sort of system-milking demonised in a benefits office in Grimsby but regarded as career progression in Westminster. It makes it appear there’s no glass ceiling in modern political life, just a reinforced lead floor. Once you’re in, you basically have to die to stop earning rewards. Take Timothy, who we can’t describe as back on his bullshit, because he’s never been off it. I’ve had yoghurts in my fridge longer than he was in the political wilderness. Or Cameron, whose CNN interview saw him still regurgitating his catchphrase “it was the right thing to do”. I do hope his forthcoming book embraces the absurdity, and is called All the Right Things to Do that I Did.

Perhaps the most staggering part – for those of us not being imprisoned or barred from our mother’s funerals, I should stress – is how little self-awareness our leaders have about their failures and their own part in them. May still reckons the worst thing she ever did was run through a wheat field.

In his 1997 Edinburgh show, the brilliant and subversive comedian Simon Munnery had this thing called the Self-Knowledge Impregnator. If an audience member transgressed by heckling, the imperious Nietzschean character he was playing would shout: “Activate the Self-Knowledge Impregnator!” Six people would then wheel an 8ft black box on stage, which contained a very powerful flash behind a piece of wood with a single word cut out of it. The lights would go out. And then … well, over to Simon. The box “would be placed directly in front of the heckler. And I would go: ‘Are you aware of what you are?’ And they’d go, ‘No’. And then we’d go [FLASH!] and it would burn the word ‘cunt’ on to their retina.”

I saw this show several times. Even if you weren’t the Self-Knowledge Impregnator’s target, you could still see the word every time you shut your eyes for ages afterwards. Don’t tell me we don’t invent beautiful machines in this country any more.

Or at least we did. That was 21 years ago. Where is the Self-Knowledge Impregnator now? Has the hour of need ever been greater? Can’t it be strapped to the back of an advertising van and driven at top speed to the next cabinet meeting, in the name of human decency?

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist