Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Ex-Border Force chief's a gonner
Confirmation that the self-resigned head of the UK Border Force, Brodie Clark, is toast, has just come from the grilling by the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee of the Home Office Permanent Secretary, Helen Ghosh, and then of Damian Green, the immigration Minister.
The 2007 operational instructions to allow non-routine relaxation of checking in certain circumstances we now know were known as 'Howie' (if I've spelt that right). It'll be a pompous acronym for something very dodgy. Anyone any guesses? 'Home Office walk-in immigration excuse'?
It turns out that they were not known about either by ministers or (supposedly) the heads of the Borders & Immigration Agency right from back in 2007. So the
BIA /Home Office at some high level (not excluding the very top) were actively hiding it from ministers.
And well they might. It turns out that 'Howie' applies only to EU citizens, and therefore Brodie Clark cannot hide behind 'Howie' with respect to any form of relaxation of checks on non-EU nationals, even if 'health & safety' concerns had triggered the recourse to 'Howie'.
That biometrics were not in place in 2007 and consequently could not be explicitly covered in 'Howie' is neither here nor there, because implicitly there was no guidance of any kind (whether unknown or known to ministers and Home Office top brass) re non-EU citizens; and also beside the point is the abuse of the guidelines to make routine what was intended to be a downgrade in checks only in an emergency. There was no scope at all for what Brodie Clark did.
So he's a gonner.
The issue then is how on earth could, supposedly, nobody senior to him not have discovered in four whole years what was going on? It was not until the most recent inspection by the independent Inspector, John Vine, that it came to light.
Either the Home Office is lying or it's incredibly incompetent.
This was the issue back in 2004 regarding what I exposed -- total incompetence and blatant lying.
It looks very much like a set-up under the previous (Labour) administration akin to the crime boss who gives an instruction on the understanding that it's not traceable back to him, and that he doesn't want to know the methods required to carry it out.
Or was it that the higher echelons of the Civil Service, with their facility to second-guess ministerial political aims, were doing the dirty work without actual instruction?
Well, as mired in PC as is the Conservative Party, they're out of whack with the insanely PC Home Office; so the cosy pulling the wool over the eyes of the public is not quite so easy now.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Weasel words from the Borders Agency (Brodie Clark) reveal the truth
So the UK is (supposedly) no-go for terrorists and serious criminals (mostly, at least) but OK for illegal migrants: that, in a nutshell is the attitude of the Borders & Immigration Agency, judging by the weasel answers of ex-Border Force chief Brodie Clark in answer to questions just now from the Home Affairs Commons Select Committee. And our old friend elf 'n safety can justify removal of checks, apparently; whenever queues start to form.
Brodie Clark was specifically asked if he had thought to tell the Home Secretary of the guidance allowing relaxed or no checking, that had been in operation, unknown to ministers (as we learnt this last weekend) since 2007 …..
"No".
No!
As the questioner then pointed out: this makes irrelevant the issue re the 'pilot' to which the Home Secretary was asked to agree, in that checks in any case had been and continued to be relaxed to a far greater extent and several years before the current 'pilot' was even thought of.
Clark had to admit that after he had leaned earlier this year of the suspension of fingerprint checks, that he "did not stop it", even though was relying on guidance from 2007 that did not even refer to fingerprinting, given that this did not come in until 2010.
The Home Office and the BIA have been hiding behind guidance in respect of checking against the 'warnings index' so as to reduce checking down to this low level instead of maintaining full immigration checks.
The upshot is that we don't have a border that excludes illegal migrants and visa fraudsters.
This is what is meant by the buzz-phrase "risk-led" to describe an approach purporting to increase UK security.
Security is – that is, should be – not merely about trying on a percentage basis to target resources variably so as to exclude serious criminals: it is – that is, it should be – concerned with generally excluding those who have no right to enter and to remain in the UK. All those who are in various ways illegals.
This is the nearest we have thus far come to the chickens coming home to roost at the Home Office. The whole upper echelons of the Home Office and the BIA (up to and including Helen Ghosh, the Permanent Secretary) are culpable for the enormous strategic – not merely operational – non-system of immigration control. But who is going to carry the can? Will it just be Brodie Clark as fall guy? Will even Clark wriggle free?
Why the Home Office doesn't control immigration
As ever, there are still further revelations (over the weekend, of no checks at ports of entry) regarding the non-system of UK immigration control. As I have long predicted, there is no bottom to this perennial story. BBC Today contacted me asking what I thought was wrong with the Home Office, so I expanded on my point that within the Home Office there is a firm conviction that immigration is an insoluble problem.
The Home Office essentially is the arm of government concerned with law and order, and this is very much about justice being seen to be done. Policing arose out of the community, and without the community officials are in a very poor position to deal with the great bulk of crime. Now that we have no community worth the name, then law enforcement is akin to gesture-politics. An example is made of the tiny proportion of offences and offenders law enforcement agencies actually manage to tackle, and it is merely hoped that this acts as a general deterrent.
It is but a short step to then subsume all effort under 'news management', and with the new politics that arrived with a vengeance under Tony Blair this is in sync with ministerial aims.
Providing great momentum to this was the compete capitulation of the establishment across the board to 'political correctness', with the Home Office especially transformed by this, in that it was deemed the lead organisation in government re 'equal opportunities and diversity' [sic].
Yes, all other tentacles of government were also afflicted, and this fed a diffusion of responsibility and the collapse of what used to be the buzz-phrase, 'joined-up thinking'. So it is that we still do not have what I have termed an 'internal gateway' so that the millions (and we are talking millions, not hundreds of thousand) of illegals and fraudulent putative legals are allowed then to access benefits and obtain National Insurance numbers.
The DWP still has no system in place whereby routinely applications are checked against records of immigration status. Far from galvanising the Home Office to stem the ever springing leaks in the immigration control bucket, it seems to reinforce an institutional shrugging of the shoulders: 'its not me guv'; just look at the DWP.
'Political correctness' is the great backlash by the elite against the masses for their failure to buy the 'progressive project' – Marxism, essentially; this manifesting in particular as withdrawing the sense of upholding rights of the host citizenry and instead giving rights to those who are not of our culture.
Let me explain. The complete failure of the political-Left ethos – for some time now the outlook of pretty well everyone in the government-media-education uber-class -- has led to what psychologists term 'cognitive-dissonance', which is salved by transferring blame from one's own sense of gullibility (for swallowing a clearly bogus theory) to those who would have benefited, supposedly, if they had taken the prescription -- 'the workers' who would have been 'liberated'. A stereotypical worker is male and white, and hence new abstractions from society had to be imagined who were deserving of 'liberation'. Any half-plausible 'victims' would do, and this is what lies behind the focus on women and ethnic minority and the obsession with anti-sexism and and anti-racism.
The migrant stereotypically is of an ethnic minority, and so it is that the rights of migrants are now asserted over those of the host population; as in the mantra at the Home Office within the Borders & Immigration Agency: "we are in the business of granting".
It was named the Immigration & Nationality Directorate when I was working there, but this name change was just more window-dressing. The BIA as with the IND is part of the Home Office that, because it is the source of endless problems for ministers and mandarins, has been hived off as a quasi-autonomous agency.
News management driving further window-dressing was also behind the much-lauded introduction of the 'points system'. This was nothing more than simply fusing Managed Migration (the backroom operation administering immigration applications, where I worked) with Work Permits UK, and meaninglessly categorising the unchanged operations within those organisations under 'tiers'. No operational changes were made of any substance.
It is never any surprise, then, that you-couldn't-make-it-up stories are always flowing out of the Home Office regarding immigration. Ministers as ever are hapless, and so are their opposite-number critics. Yvette Cooper last week was asked by an interviewer on BBC Today that if she was so concerned about border checks then what about the situation whereby anyone can simply fly into Dublin and cross the border into the UK without any checks. She was completely flustered. That such an obvious ridiculous loophole in immigration controls can exist speaks volumes about the attitude of the Home Office.
Morale across the whole BIA and especially in the front-line Border Force has been and continues to be at rock bottom; not least under the assault of cuts in staffing numbers. Even before any cuts there are near order-of-magnitude deficits in the numbers of front-line immigration officers that would be required to seek illegals and remove [sic], never mind actually deport them.
As for our current Home Secretary, Teresa May: is she seriously claiming that it took her eighteen months to wake up to the fact that we have in effect no immigration control system? How, given the ignominious history of the Home Office, could she possibly think that agreeing to a pilot scheme to relax controls wouldn't be a case of giving an inch that resulted in the taking of a mile? How hapless can you get?
At least we have a Home Secretary who says she wants to control immigration. In my day, the then Home Secretary – David Blunkett – stated openly that he saw no ceiling to the growth of mass immigration. Both he and the then immigration minister, Beverly Hughes, actually colluded with Home Office failure. The only thing that Beverley Hughes stated in her memos to us that she was interested in was facilitating the entry of women who claimed (that is, merely claimed: no evidence required) that they had been subjected to domestic violence!
Such is the depth of the catastrophe that is the Home Office that nothing short of a root-and-branch reform is necessary, but this presupposes a radical change in political will of which none of the three PC-overwhelmed main political parties are capable.
Why the Home Office doesn't control immigration
As ever, there are still further revelations (over the weekend, of no checks at ports of entry) regarding the non-system of UK immigration control. As I have long predicted, there is no bottom to this perennial story. BBC Today contacted me asking what I thought was wrong with the Home Office, so I expanded on my point that within the Home Office there is a firm conviction that immigration is an insoluble problem.
The Home Office essentially is the arm of government concerned with law and order, and this is very much about justice being seen to be done. Policing arose out of the community, and without the community officials are in a very poor position to deal with the great bulk of crime. Now that we have no community worth the name, then law enforcement is akin to gesture-politics. An example is made of the tiny proportion of offences and offenders law enforcement agencies actually manage to tackle, and it is merely hoped that this acts as a general deterrent.
It is but a short step to then subsume all effort under 'news management', and with the new politics that arrived with a vengeance under Tony Blair this is in sync with ministerial aims.
Providing great momentum to this was the compete capitulation of the establishment across the board to 'political correctness', with the Home Office especially transformed by this, in that it was deemed the lead organisation in government re 'equal opportunities and diversity' [sic].
Yes, all other tentacles of government were also afflicted, and this fed a diffusion of responsibility and the collapse of what used to be the buzz-phrase, 'joined-up thinking'. So it is that we still do not have what I have termed an 'internal gateway' so that the millions (and we are talking millions, not hundreds of thousand) of illegals and fraudulent putative legals are allowed then to access benefits and obtain National Insurance numbers.
The DWP still has no system in place whereby routinely applications are checked against records of immigration status. Far from galvanising the Home Office to stem the ever springing leaks in the immigration control bucket, it seems to reinforce an institutional shrugging of the shoulders: 'its not me guv'; just look at the DWP.
'Political correctness' is the great backlash by the elite against the masses for their failure to buy the 'progressive project' – Marxism, essentially; this manifesting in particular as withdrawing the sense of upholding rights of the host citizenry and instead giving rights to those who are not of our culture.
Let me explain. The complete failure of the political-Left ethos – for some time now the outlook of pretty well everyone in the government-media-education uber-class -- has led to what psychologists term 'cognitive-dissonance', which is salved by transferring blame from one's own sense of gullibility (for swallowing a clearly bogus theory) to those who would have benefited, supposedly, if they had taken the prescription -- 'the workers' who would have been 'liberated'. A stereotypical worker is male and white, and hence new abstractions from society had to be imagined who were deserving of 'liberation'. Any half-plausible 'victims' would do, and this is what lies behind the focus on women and ethnic minority and the obsession with anti-sexism and and anti-racism.
The migrant stereotypically is of an ethnic minority, and so it is that the rights of migrants are now asserted over those of the host population; as in the mantra at the Home Office within the Borders & Immigration Agency: "we are in the business of granting".
It was named the Immigration & Nationality Directorate when I was working there, but this name change was just more window-dressing. The BIA as with the IND is part of the Home Office that, because it is the source of endless problems for ministers and mandarins, has been hived off as a quasi-autonomous agency.
News management driving further window-dressing was also behind the much-lauded introduction of the 'points system'. This was nothing more than simply fusing Managed Migration (the backroom operation administering immigration applications, where I worked) with Work Permits UK, and meaninglessly categorising the unchanged operations within those organisations under 'tiers'. No operational changes were made of any substance.
It is never any surprise, then, that you-couldn't-make-it-up stories are always flowing out of the Home Office regarding immigration. Ministers as ever are hapless, and so are their opposite-number critics. Yvette Cooper last week was asked by an interviewer on BBC Today that if she was so concerned about border checks then what about the situation whereby anyone can simply fly into Dublin and cross the border into the UK without any checks. She was completely flustered. That such an obvious ridiculous loophole in immigration controls, can exist speaks volumes about the attitude of the Home Office.
Morale across the whole BIA and especially in the front-line Border Force has been and continues to be at rock bottom; not least under the assault of staff cuts in staffing numbers. Even before any cuts there are near order-of-magnitude deficit in the numbers of front-line immigration officers that would be required to seek illegals and remove [sic], never mind actually deport them.
As for our current Home Secretary, Teresa May: is she seriously claiming that it took her eighteen months to wake up to the fact that we have in effect no immigration control system? How, given the ignominious history of the Home Office, could she possibly think that agreeing to a pilot scheme to relax controls wouldn't be a case of giving an inch that resulted in the taking of a mile? How hapless can you get?
At least we have a Home Secretary who says she wants to control immigration. In my day, the then Home Secretary – David Blunkett – stated openly that he saw no ceiling to the growth of mass immigration. Both he and the then immigration minister, Beverly Hughes, actually colluded with Home Office failure. The only thing that Beverley Hughes stated in her memos to us that she was interested in was facilitating the entry of women who claimed (that is, merely claimed: no evidence required) that they had been subjected to domestic violence!
Such is the depth of the catastrophe that is the Home Office that nothing short of a root-and-branch reform is necessary, but this presupposes a radical change in political will of which none of the three PC-overwhelmed main political parties are capable.
Wednesday, November 09, 2011
Borders Agency latest exposé: 3
So, a no-checks policy at ports-of-entry goes back to 2008/2009. That's the bombshell dropped by Brodie Clark, the suspended and now self-sacked Border Force chief. It seems, then, that the hapless Home Secretary made the naive, fatal error of assuming that the Borders & Immigration Agency actually works; that it actually carries out any sort of effective border control.
Naturally, nobody normally would assume that an organisation could so self-undermine its own brief, but the BIA and the Home Office does not accept that immigration control is something that can be done. It therefore runs what it imagines appears from a distance to be just about a plausible excuse for an immigration system, with the odd media stunt and lots of news management. But that's it.
The Borders & Immigration Agency is akin to all those blow-up fake tanks and wooden aircraft mock-ups that were set up near Dover to con the Germans towards the end of World war II that D-Day would be across the Dover Straits. The actual invasion force was further down the south coast massing in preparation to hit Normandy, of course. Unfortunately, the analogy breaks down there, because we don't have the equivalent of the real invasion force. We have only the Border Force mock-up. We don't have the real immigration control and administration service.
The chickens are staring to come home to roost regarding the most senior figures at the BIA / Home Office. After all, Brodie Clark himself headed up the branch of the BIA responsible for ports-of-entry. But the culprits higher up than Brodie Clark seem to be making him the fall guy: The new BIA chief executive, Rob Whiteman, has gone on record that Brodie Clark told him that he had exceeded Teresa May's instructions. Well of course he must have done so, if a no-checks policy was already in place long before Mrs May's Government had even been elected!
Monday, November 07, 2011
The UK Borders & Immigration Agency now has to suspend its own bosses: 2
This latest in the interminable line of immigration fiascos has distinct echoes of the scandal I myself exposed back in 2004, when instruction from on high was to waive all checks on immigration applications in our 'back-room' office of Managed Migration. The Home Office line was that this was down to rogue local management, when clearly it came from the top brass – the Immigration & Nationality Directorate (as it was called then: it's now the Borders & Immigration Agency) and Home Office top management and mandarins. There was a traditional whitewash report (the Sutton Report) to officially clear them. The ministers (Beverley Hughes and David Blunkett) were hopelessly out of their depth, and giving support through their 'political-correctness' ethos.
The difference, evidently, between the latest debacle and the one I was involved in exposing, is that the seniority of the staff they suspend has ascended the Home Office greasy pole. Now, instead of local managers at Sheffield Managed Migration (and the minion who 'whistle-blew': yours truly), instead it's Brodie Clark, the head guy of the section of the Borders & Immigration Agency in charge of ports-of-entry.
I suppose, for such a non-functioning dog's dinner job as is UK immigration control, that this is an advance!
At root is the Home Office firm belief that immigration is an insoluble problem, together with the ethos of 'political-correctness', of course. But politicians are often complicit. It was under the previous Conservative Government (the one immediately before Blair came to power), with Michael Howard at the Home Office helm, that EU passport holders were first waived through passport control.
With a bit of luck there will be clear fingerprints of Home Office top brass at the scene of the crime and the Home Office will be further exposed for the useless and politicised serious dysfunctionality it is.
Friday, November 04, 2011
The UK Border Agency now has to suspend not staff but its OWN BOSSES! And it STILL dumps hundreds of thousands of cases in a skip; and STILL has a 'no checks' policy.
The (sub-)Ministry of You-Couldn't-Make-it-Up strikes yet again. Yes, the UK Border Agency – the bit of the Home Office that so totally embarrassed the rest of it (and that is some feat) that they had to tow it out into the English Channel, sink, and re-name it (again) … it's STILL, even now, taking the files of hundreds of thousands of immigration cases they've lost all track of and dumping them in a skip.
I love the name of the skip: the 'controlled archive'.
[Hilarious euphemism has long been the main work officials perform there. The 'no checks' application dumping regime was – and so far as I know still is – called the Backlog Reduction Accelerated Clearance Exercise, and therefore enjoys the seemingly robust acronym of BRACE.]
We now await a journalist to find the skips in which the un-shredded documents have been relocated in such carefully controlled fashion.
AND .…. oh yes, get this: this same numptiedom, that used to be called the Immigration & Nationality Directorate (because from way back it had form embarrassing the Gnome Office) … it's STILL suspending people.
But wait, everything stays the same and everything changes: they're now suspending the UK Border Agency BOSSES … for ordering staff to tear up immigration law and simply not do any checks!
Wow!
Now, if you recall, in my day they suspended (not to mention fired) the junior STAFF for pointing out that the bosses were tearing up immigration law and forcing staff to not do any checks.
Hang on though: this is not for telling staff to forget hundreds of thousands of 'lost' cases: this is for telling staff not to check people at airports, so as to cut down queues. An additional and quite separate crazy business. So they HAVEN'T suspended anybody for the ever-ongoing mass case-dumping nonsense; despite this having been going on for about a decade now.
So nothing changes after all.
The Home Office's immigration sub-department remains the complete and utter joke it has always been. Unless you've worked there you can have no idea just how – and to use again the words of former Home Secretary John Reid – dysfunctional and not-fit-for-purpose an organisation could actually get to be. I still even now have difficulty in believing it really could be that bad. But it truly is. Nothing this bad exists in theory, but exist in practice it very much does.
Thursday, November 03, 2011
'Family justice'?! Men remain not second-class but not citizens at all.
The joke of calling the most extreme prejudice towards and discrimination against men "family justice" is underlined by the appalling and unbelievable decision by 'former civil servant' David Norgrove (who?), the chairman of the official review on family justice which is published today, to continue to deny divorced men the most basic right in any society, to a relationship with their own biological children.
This is so fundamental that it thereby discharges men from the duty of upholding any obligations placed upon them by the state.
Why, for example, pay tax to authorities that openly and blatantly attack you and systematically deny your most basic rights?
Why accept conscription in time of war when what men are called to defend is utterly indefensible?
This continued completely unacceptable state of affairs provides the foundation for campaigns against the government: campaigns (and this cannot be said lightly) that could justifiably feature violence.
It really is that bad; that simple.
