Tuesday, March 26, 2013
The useless and dishonest UKBA to be brought back under the Home Office
So the Home Secretary has today responded to the endless dire reports into the UKBA by the Home Affairs Select Committee.
The devil will be in the detail of the ensuing Immigration Bill, but it's right to place immigration properly within the Home Office instead of distancing it from government as a separate agency. That was an entirely cynical measure by the previous Government to remove responsibility -- egg-on-face -- from Home Office senior management and (most of all) ministers.
It seems particularly right to separate enforcement from processing visa applications.
This does not at all mean, of course, that they will get it any more right than the almighty hopeless mess its been in for the past 14 years; especially unless they are going to resource it properly to pay for more staff and far better training.
Teresa May talks of culture issues, but the corrosive culture is top-down -- from the very pinnacle of the Home Office downwards: the resignation to immigration being an insoluble problem (and that, therefore, all you can do is 'news manage'), and the PC politics whereby potential migrants are viewed as having the same rights as UK indigenous citizens.
# posted by Steve Moxon @ 2:58 pm 
