Home Secretary Sajid Javid was reported as saying that illegal immigrants would be subject to a ‘compliant environment’, which triggered David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, to erupt into a paroxysm of hyperbole and bizarre conflation which exceeded even his normal tendency to extreme interpretation of the English language. He replied by saying (according to the Huff Post)
“Slaves having to nod and smile when they were being whipped in a cotton field or a sugar cane field were compliant. Watching your partner being tied to a tree, beaten or raped, on a plantation, is compliance.”
What ? The various meanings of ‘compliance’ as per the OED can essentially be summarised as “The state or fact of according with or meeting rules or standards”
Grumpy lives in a compliant environment. If he breaks the speed limit and is caught the law applies sanctions for his non-compliance. Every citizen has to comply with the laws and rules of society without exception, including one assumes, David Lammy himself. But Grumpy doesn’t see this obligation (imposed as a social consensus to avoid anarchy) as somehow harking back to the days of the stocks and disembowelling, and those days of yore of English serfdom are not ‘written deep into our souls’. It was not passed down from our ancestors.
The Windrush immigrants – British citizens and legal immigrants – have been treated disgracefully, and that current wrong should be righted. But Savid Javid didn’t include these in his statement – he talked of illegal immigrants, which valid Windrush individuals are not.
What Lammy seems to be saying is that seeking to hold illegal immigrants – not to mince words, criminals – subject to the same the standards of compliance with the laws of the land as the indigenous population because of events which were abolished in the Empire in 1833 is somehow abhorrent. The guy is as harmless as he is ineffectual, but he does need to reign in the wilder excesses of his associations, or he simply looks stupid.
The Oxford English Dictionary has of ‘paranoia’ “.. mental condition characterised by delusions of persecution”. His hyperbolic, irrelevant and patently unsupportable statements seem to meet that definition well.