Staggering Incompetence

Camilla Cavendish in the Times:

For years, the Immigration and Nationality Directorate and the Prison and Probation Service have been slowly dissolving in the stew of their own staggering incompetence. Those on the inside can only shrug at the latest revelation that more than 1,000 convicted rapists, murderers, drug dealers and other nasties who should have been deported are roaming a land where they have no business to be, with no one knowing where most of them are. Those on the outside have suddenly had enough. This should be a turning point.

In the past few years the metropolitan elite have been too busy boasting about how little they pay their Filipina nannies and Hungarian cleaners to bother much about the violent gangs, paedophiles, traffickers and drug mules who have slipped in alongside. Now they are told that Wormwood Scrubs is occupied by 85 nationalities speaking 24 languages, and that almost 13 per cent of those in detention are foreign, it will be harder to cast the white working classes so exclusively as the thugs and xenophobes. The failure to deport foreign criminals is not just a “breakdown in communications”, as Charles Clarke has claimed. It is also a consequence of the deliberate policy of encouraging immigration on an unprecedented scale, a policy that has never been put to the electorate. Once again the Government is lamenting that it has lost control of the paperwork, and is promising to do better. But when you’ve lost control of the borders, the paperwork is pretty meaningless.

Since the abolition of embarkation controls in 1988, there has been no effective record of who comes in and out of Britain. Our visa offices overseas, as one despairing immigration officer with 40 years’ experience told me recently, “are instructed to issue visas to all and sundry with the most cursory of interviews or none at all”. A criminal record was no bar to entry for the Latvian rapist who had served ten years at home before killing a schoolgirl in Greenford, West London last year. Nor to the Pole who raped a woman in Llanelli after serving nine years in Poland.

Might these facts – just possibly – have something to do with the recent BNP scare?

What makes it worse is the zeal with which the Home Office pursue genuinely deserving cases: for instance, their determination to deport Zimbabwean asylum seekers back into the hands of Mugabe’s goons, or the case of Eleonora Suhoviy.