Tuesday, November 15, 2011
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.
# posted by Steve Moxon @ 6:59 am 
