Simon Israel is a Senior Home Affairs Correspondent for Channel 4 News.
Robustly independent reporting on home affairs. Covers crime, police, terrorism, legal, race, immigration, social justice, prisons.Award winning films on terrorism, G20 protests, Stephen Lawrence, illegal immigration, suicides in prisons.
Simon Israel has been home affairs correspondent since 1998. He's broken a number of exclusives, including the resignation of the officer in charge of counter terrorism, racism in the crown prosecution service, the abuse of restraint methods on detained children, the Government's resettlement programme for refugees.
"My objective is to try to come at stories from an original perspective but one which resonates with the viewer and challenges the establishment."
Immigration, and our attitude to it, has rarely been out of the headlines, as these revelatory Channel 4 News reports by Simon Israel from the last decade show.
For weeks, the Home Office under Amber Rudd said repeatedly that they were not aware of any Windrush deportations,although they were checking. Today, Home Secretary Sajid Javid has admitted that more than 60 people caught up in the Windrush scandal may have been wrongly deported, and there could be more. When he was appointed last…
The restraint methods used on asylum seekers transferred from the UK to other countries has been found to be excessive, unreasonable, and disproportionate according to the chief inspector of prisons months after the Home Office said the practice had stopped. Peter Clarke said they had serious concerns about the way a plane load of detainees were treated…
The public inquiry into undercover policing won’t hand it’s final report to the Home Secretary for another 5 years – in 2023. The revelation comes in the publication of a strategic review of the inquiry into 40 years of undercover policing which opened in 2015 and but will only begin to hear evidence in public…
The Windrush scandal has brought the UK’s immigration system into the spotlight. But it’s not just those who came over to Britain decades ago who are concerned. Two young women who were born in the Caribbean but have lived here since they were children talk to us about how it feels to not be officially…
The number of potential Windrush cases reported to a specialist Home Office unit has now risen to 3,000. The figures were revealed as Labour used a parliamentary debate to try to force the the government to release of all correspondence between ministers, officials and special advisers between May 2010 and 2018 relating to the Windrush…
Yesterday she said there were no immigration removal targets. Today the Home Secretary Amber Rudd admitted there were – but declared that what she called ”local” targets would now be abolished. Labour accused her of trying to blame officials – again demanding that she resign as the fallout over the Windrush scandal continues. The Home…
The Windrush scandal dominated proceedings in Westminster today, with Home Secretary Amber Rudd coming under more pressure to resign. Jeremy Corbyn demanded the government rethink what he called its “cruel” immigration policy and get rid of “bogus” targets. Ms Rudd told MPs she bitterly regretted her failure to grasp the scale of the scandal sooner.…
It’s not just the older immigrants from the Caribbean who have been caught up in this Windrush scandal. Some of their children and grandchildren have found themselves denied British citizenship too. In a different context Theresa May once lambasted people she called the ‘citizens of nowhere’, but has she in effect created such citizens of…
They should be in no doubt of their right to remain: this from the Home Secretary tonight after a deal with Caribbean leaders over the Windrush fiasco. And a promise, finally, of security to those who came here as children and have lived here ever since. After talks with the High Commissioners from Barbados and St…
The mother of a Windrush child has called on Theresa May to reflect on what she is doing to the country after her 58-year-old son was found dead last month.
The improbable juxtaposition of Commonwealth heads of government, 12 of them from the Caribbean, being in London on the very day that this vast controversy erupted, has deepened the scale of the row.
The government has admitted the way it has treated people who came to the UK from the Caribbean as children before 1973 was a mistake and apologised. There were angry exchanges in parliament as the Home Secretary Amber Rudd admitted that immigration policy had been put before the treatment of people.
It’s thirty six hours since the missiles were aimed at targets in Syria. Today the diplomatic battle returned to centre stage. The Foreign Secretary says it’s been important to show the world that the use of chemical weapons is intolerable, but Boris Johnson admits there’s precious little the Government can do about the humanitarian disaster…
The Government has already published the detailed legal advice justifying the airstrikes on Syria. This after the Prime Minister defended going ahead without seeking Parliament’s backing. Mrs May held telephone talks with Presidents Trump and Macron this afternoon – with all three leaders hailing the joint bombing campaign as a “success”. A warning, there are some…