Friday, May 26, 2006
'Dysfunctional' only 'some of the time'?
John Reid underestimates the seriousness of the mess at the Home Office. The Department has even more intractabler problems than have so far been discussed. Reid, in his statement to a commons select committee, said that he did not believe that the Home Office was "intrinsically dysfunctional... but I do believe from time to time it is dysfunctional". Well, he acknowledges major failure in pretty well all respects: leadership, management, systems and processes. The question is: what is at the root of this comprehensive failure?
Apart from the answers that a management consultant could provide, there is the obvious difficulty intrinsic to the interface between the Civil Service and its political masters, but made much worse by the politicisation of the Civil Service to perform more like an ongoing PR exercise than to do its actual job. Simon Jenkins (Guardian) describes it as a power hungry empire building of short-termism: "a Valhalla of bureaucracy's living dead beyond even the satire of Dickens's Department of Circumlocution". But there is something else, and it is a real deep-seated cause. I would venture that you cannot separate the acknowledged major failure from the political issue that the Home Office is riven with political correctness fascism. This distracts from and re-prioritises what the Home Office as a whole and its constituent divisions should actually be doing, and hinders communication upwards and between directorates.
This is not, as at the BBC, more an aggregate result of the political bias of individuals than a 'line' that the organisation takes; but in many respects official policy.
The PC fascist stance is the backlash to end all backlashes against ordinary people by the political Left orientated political classes, whereby anyone and everyone (women, gays, the disabled, the non-native) are considered more worthy than are ordinary people (specifically men), who are falsely portrayed as the mirror image of the supposedly unblameworthy.
It was beautifully illustrated in the actual refusal to apologise for the labelling of 2,700 people as guilty of crimes of which they were not even accused -- flouting a principle of justice even more fundamental than that of 'innocent until proven guilty'. It is demonstrated across the Home Office: for example, in the target to employ women in half of all senior posts -- necessarily requiring massive direct discrimination against men; in the campaign to imprison innocent men accused of rape by the Kafkaesque rape law (reversing the burden of proof) that it has recently enacted as a result of its own Sex Offences Review ('Setting the Boundaries'), which completely ignored the record number of objections to proposals; in the extreme difficulty men encounter in being recruited to the Probation Service, which displays an amazing attitude towards criminals (in that they are supposed victims of of 'patriarchal society' -- sex offenders excepted, of course: they are regarded as 'patriarchy' incarnate). And so on: there are examples galore.
Nothing this pernicious has ever held sway within the establishment of a modern society. It does of course apply across the West generally, not just in the UK and in the Home Office; but the Home Office is a blatant case. In what is the self-proclaimed 'lead department' in UK government when it comes to 'equal opportunity and diversity', this is alarming to say the very least.
Thursday, May 25, 2006
The customer is never right: extraordinary blame shifting by a dysfunctional Straw
The customer is never right with this Government or the Home Office, and certainly not, according to former Home Secretary Jack Straw. The customer, he should be reminded, is the entire population that is in direct contact in various ways with components of the Department, and in particular the taxpayer who pays for it; and relies on it for the most important kinds of protection. The customers are not the asylum seekers, criminals and others that are those with which the Home Office fails to deal with on our behalf.
Straw claimed today that the "fundamental problem" with the Home Office is not the staff or the top civil servants or ministers, but many of its "customers", whom he described as "dysfunctional individuals". They are a "burden" and a "challenge", he said.
This is actually the Home Office attitude to the ordinary person in its doctrine of political correctness fascism - the great backlash against ordinary people - that the biggest Government department has willingly lapped up and which now distorts and dictates the priorities of this 'roll on-roll off' dangerous ship of state.
Other Government departments don't have such problems with its "customers", our Jack opines. We are, apparently, "willing volunteers". Indeed we are - though not now so willing - in an experiment perhaps not unlike the medical one that recently famously went wrong.
The fallout from the great Home Office "hurricane" (as its chief today described recent events) is producing daily insights into the bizarre thinking of our daft leaders. In the logic of PC fascism, non-native people are more worthy than the Home Office's actual customers, the UK population - or at least they were. Is New Labour now trying to outdo the 'far right'? I don't recall anyone even from the BNP referring to recent migrants as "dysfunctional". We would of course have heard about that, and would still be hearing about it however long ago it had been said.
Steve Moxon
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Illegal immigrants: why the total must be in the millions
The Government now can't seem to make up its mind whether or not it has an estimate for the total number of illegal immigrants living in Britain. Tony Blair hid behind an old quote of Michael Howard's during Prime Minister's Questions: that by rights they should not have a clue. Yet during the run-up to the last election it was leaked that the Government did indeed have an estimate, and one that it had itself commissioned. This was from Professor Salt (of the Migration Research Unit at University College London); that there were half a million. John Reid referred to it in interview on Wednesday - though shrinking it by a hundred thousand, rather than pointing out the many respects in which it is a heavy under-count.
Salt's total does not include all those not working - likely to be the majority of illegal migrants - nor does it include dependents. That will be a very large number, in line with immigration service practice of counting whole groups of people who are even vaguely related as one case. Including, instead of bizarrely excluding these two pools of migrants straight away takes the total to over a million, but that is just the start. As Migrationwatch pointed out shortly after the leak, the estimate is based on figures then already five years out-of-date and thereby missing not only the peak in bogus asylum applications but also much of the cumulative effect of the combined methods of illegal entry.
What really torpedoes the credibility of the measure though, is how the Professor came up with his estimate. It was by an international comparison. The problem is that such a comparison is not valid for Britain. Salt looked at various countries around the world where there had been amnesties given to illegal entrants. He compared the numbers who came out of the woodwork with the numbers who had arrived through legal application, and came up with a ratio of 20%. He then applied this to Britain. He reckons that, of the supposed three million here legally, there are an additional one-fifth of that number living illegally. That would be 600,000 - which he rounded down to a slightly less scary half a million.
Such a calculation - or rather one that arrived at the million plus more proper total - would be reasonable if Britain was a destination similar to other nations, but the UK, quite apart from its uniqueness (the USA apart) in being a fully developed wealthy post-industrial country with an uncapped mass immigration policy, is special for several reasons. It is unusual in having the international language of English as the native tongue. This makes life much more feasible for a migrant. We have US style free labour laws combined with EU style generous welfare benefits; and we also have a growing economy. There are the famously non-existent checks on anyone entering the country and the relentless determination of the Home Office not to pursue anyone, regardless of how flagrantly they contravene immigration law. Most of all, not least because of our Commonwealth history, we have a large number of migrant enclaves of various nationalities, and various sub-groups of nationalities according to religion, and region or even city of origin, and so on. This acts as a crucial magnet that accelerates in so-called 'chain migration'. After millions make a beeline for the UK, there develops a dynamic aspect to considerably boost the flow: enclaves suck in people at an ever faster rate.
We have everything a would-be migrant needs: a destination that is easy to enter clandestinely or fraudulently and easy to remain in even as an indefinite overstayer on a legitimate visa; but which also provides a home-from-home community of fellow nationals within a wider community that speaks the international language. So many of his fellow nationals are already here that some of them may be from the would-be migrant's own village/town or even his own relatives. We have chain migration on several levels right down to the extended family. The larger the community and the better the support, the easier it is to facilitate illegal entry and to remain undetected. Perfect.
A further effect then comes into play. Because the system is so over-loaded with applicants, and because of the official 'no ceiling' policy and tradition of an open arms welcome, there is a hopeless mismatch between admitting people and refusing or ejecting them. There seems no point in policing a system that is so open to abuse and to being circumvented. The immigration service gives up, and word gets out that Britain is an even easier place to get in to and stay in than anyone had dared to imagine. As legal migration accelerates, so does all of the kinds of illegal migration. Making everything easier doesn't just mean that would-be illegals get in legitimately, but that more of those who previously had no hope at all - and still haven't by any legal route - try their luck by blatant fraud, bending the rules or smuggling themselves in; either way knowing that at the very worst they won't be treated harshly and have a very good chance of simply being left alone.
Add all of the factors together that make Britain special and an international comparison is entirely inappropriate when applied to Britain. The total, remember, was already over a million. With the necessary adjustments to compensate for our special status: who knows how many millions the true total of illegal immigrants runs to. No one dares even to suggest that they might venture a guess.
The guesstimate the Government uses is a very indirect, what might be called a top-down approach. Can we work out in another way the number of illegal migrants? Well, instead we could look from the bottom up, as it were: by taking samples of the four general non-legal routes of entry and extrapolating them and adding these together. The four routes are: clandestine entry through a port, overstaying a visa, illegal switching from one immigration category to another, and fraudulent application.
Unfortunately, only one of these - clandestine entry - is relatively easy to sample and so to measure. In producing a report, Welcome to the Asylum, for the Centre for Policy Studies, Harriet Sergeant had spent several weeks with immigration service staff at Dover. She saw how many illegals were apprehended as they were being smuggled in lorries, and worked out according to the small fraction of traffic searched what the rate would be each month. Extrapolating to the whole year she came to the startling figure of 300,000. That is for just the one port, and in respect of the method of entry least favoured by migrants: only those who would be regarded with special suspicion need hide in lorries.
The upshot is that an estimate from the bottom-up, as it were, will also show that the Government's guesstimate is a joke.
Why we are in this comprehensively ridiculous situation is at root down to a complete absence of political will; or rather, a bizarre will of political correctness fascism. This is the backlash to end all backlashes, by the establishment now of the political Left that seeks revenge on the ordinary person -- specifically the ordinary man -- for not 'rising up', as it were, as he was expected and urged to do. The quintessential non-ordinary man is someone who does not even come from the country or from anywhere within the capitalist West, but is a new arrival, innocent of all charges, you could say.
We really do live in strange and unprecedented times.
Steve Moxon
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Fundamental dis-government in the Home Office stance over mis-labelling men as criminals
The now officially "dysfunctional" Home Office in saying that it has to "err on the side of caution" in refusing to apologise for falsely labelling 1,500 men as criminals (resulting in them actually being denied jobs and even university places): is any more confirmation needed that there is the very opposite of justice in the Government department that is itself governed by the rules of political correctness fascism?
The Home Office spokesman said that: "The Criminal Records Bureau's first and foremost priority is to help protect children and vulnerable adults". Clearly it is not. Its very first and foremost duty is not to falsely label innocent men as guilty, when the possibility of guilt is not even in question. This is even more fundamental than the principle of 'innocent until proven guilty' in a court of law, which the Home Office has also comprehensively overturned in the Kafkaesque rape law that it has recently enacted as a result of its own Sex Offences Review ('Setting the Boundaries'), which completely ignored the record number of objections to proposals.
The issue is not diminished by the low proportion of CRB checks that result in such blatant injustice: it is the attitude of the Home Office in dismissing them as justified collateral that is so indicative of the highly dangerous times that we are entering.
The mis-application of a 'precautionary principle' at progressively earlier stages of consideration - here re a list ahead of being on any list of being considered for a job - inevitably results in profound injustice and the profound opposite of the most basic principles of justice. In the end it can lead to the labelling of all men as criminal, however unblemished is their character.
This is of course a trend to which the Home Office desires. Being governed by the principle of political correctness fascism, which is the backlash to end all backlashes against ordinary people by the political Left orientated political classes; then anyone and everyone (women, gays, the disabled, the non-native) are considered more worthy than are men. Men are falsely portrayed as the mirror image of the supposedly unblameworthy.
Nothing this pernicious has ever held sway within the establishment of a society. It does of course apply across the West generally, not just in the UK and in the Home Office, but the Home Office is a blatant case, and in the 'lead department' in UK government when it comes to 'equal opportunity and diversity' this is alarming to say the very least.
The Home Office's motto about justice is now very much like the deception of 'arbeit mach frei'.
Introduction: The Abandoned Line
This book is about the profound failure of Home Office immigration/ asylum policy and the inability to put even the flawed policy into practice. Far from just being a problem of tens of thousands of East Europeans slipping illegally into Britain ahead of Mayday 2004 - as Government apologists would have you believe - I reveal how the systematic abuses of procedure and open invitation to fraud (instigated and allowed by the Home Office at ministerial and top management levels) extend across the whole of Managed Migration.This applies to all of the different types of cases: in particular students, marriage and dependent relatives. There are fundamental problems with both the general ways of working and all the various ways to avoid bothering to apply particular immigration rules. The whole shebang clearly was inspired by what, to most people’s minds, is a bizarre attitude to the relation between British citizens and all the other people in the world.
The Great Immigration Scandal
On 8 March 2004, I was suspended on full pay from my job as a Home Office immigration caseworker having blown the whistle on widespread abuse and cover-up of the government's policy of 'Managed Migration'. My revelations in the Sunday Times contributed to the resignation of immigration minister Beverley Hughes.
On 26 July 2004, I was dismissed for the crime of "embarrassing ministers", leading to immediate calls in the Sunday Times and Daily Mail for my re-instatement. In the words of David Davis MP, shadow home secretary: "It is outrageous that the man who is primarily responsible for the government having to take a grip of our failing immigration policy has been punished for so doing."
In my book, The Great Immigration Scandal I outline the events that led to the decision that I could no longer participate in a policy that appeared to be at odds with the intentions of Parliament. The book includes an extensive analysis of the relevant scholarly literature in demography, economics and psychology. At the time of publication (August 2004) the book was castigated by the political left but the arguments contained within it have been vindicated by subsequent events.
However my main research interest is not immigration, it is men-women relationships. I am the media spokesman for Mankind and gender fascism. My next book, The Woman Racket, will be published by Imprint Academic in 2007.
