You may recall Ama Sumani.
She’s the terminally ill 39-year-old widow and mother-of-two that “we” removed from a Cardiff hospital last week and deported to a country where she couldn’t get the medical treatment needed to keep her alive for a while longer.
It’s taken me 48 hours to calm down enough to report that the delightful, fragrant and charming Chief Executive of the Border and Immigration Agency, Lin Homer told the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee on Tuesday that:
I think it is difficult to see the circumstances in which this case stands out from the many very difficult cases we consider.
Doesn’t it just make you feel warm inside? 21st century British compassion at its best.
Rot in Hell, cow.
Today, Will Ross on Radio 4′s From Our Own Correspondent reported that Ms. Sumani’s health is deteriorating precisely as her lawyers and doctors told Ms. Homer’s Agency it would:
This week I have seen Ama deteriorate as she skips the dialysis treatment. Her face and feet have swollen and she can barely walk.
Ross – who makes the extremely valid point that “we” might actually owe Ghana one, given how many of their trained medical workers we nick to staff the NHS – also reported that an anonymous British woman has donated £2,500 to allow Ms. Sumani to begin the dialysis treatment in Ghana.
What happens in three months’ time when that money runs out is, of course, anybody’s guess…
(A podcast of From Our Own Correspondent is downloadable via the link above for the next week.)
This is a fucking national disgrace: I’m furious and embarrassed and ashamed and sick to the stomach to the point of incoherence. And most infuriatingly of all I can’t think of a single thing to do about it that will make the slightest bit of difference.
The only thing I can think of is that somebody should marry her.
Does anyone have any single friends who feel like they haven’t done anything worthwhile in their lives yet?
Of course, solving this case doesn’t make the entire system go away.
You’re right, of course. This is simply one of dozens of heartbreaking stories every week but this one has got me bent out of shape for some reason – perhaps because it seems to encapsulate almost everything that’s wrong about our society, our media and our politics today.
I’ve spent nine years watching, at close quarters, big business fuck up spectacularly day after day. Private sector management never learns from its mistakes but it does – generally speaking – understand PR. Over the years I’ve had to send nasty letters to all sorts of chancers but every time it’s been clear we (as a business) have genuinely fucked something up the issue has been put right to the best of our abilities, as quickly as possible.
If this had been a private sector issue, the minute it hit a director’s radar is the minute the word would have gone out: “Put this woman in a First Class seat on the next plane back to London and drive her all the way from Heathrow back to Cardiff and her hospital.” In fact, I don’t think it would have got near a director: it would and should have been dealt with by people at my risible middle-management level.
The fact that this could have happened without someone with clout within our government – a government that is at least notionally connected with the historic humanitarian principles held by the Labour Party – saying the same thing beggars belief and demonstrates that it has become so distant from doing the right thing that it is morally and intellectually bankrupt.
The fact that our government has done nothing demonstrates yet again that it cares more about what Paul Dacre and Richard Littlejohn think than about what good they can do with the power they have fought so ruthlessly to win.
The fact that – as Will Ross says – there are plenty of people who say, “She’s an illegal immigrant and this is the National Health Service, not the International Health Service,” demonstrates what an ignorant and compassionless country we have become. (Particularly when those same people are likely to show a lot less respect to the Ghanian doctors and nurses that might treat them if they are unfortunate enough to end up in an NHS bed than they would if a white British medic was treating them.)
All that was needed was for one person to stand up and be counted to do the right thing and nobody did. In the overall scheme of things this is A Small Thing. To the world’s fifth largest economy, the cost would have been tiny.
Ms. Sumani is terminally ill. I hope she lives for months and years to come but when she does die, I hope she haunts every single one of those people who failed to stand up and be counted.
I only exist because this country accepted two people fleeing Nazi persecution 70something years ago. If my grandparents arrived here today, they’d be banged up in a detention centre for up to a year, treated by The System with suspicion and vilified by the media.
If that’s progress, I’m a banana.