Politics

Red Meat for the Daily Mail – Part 2

Just over five years ago John (now Lord) Reid infamously described the Home Office as “not fit for purpose”. He proudly announced that the Immigration and Nationality Directorate would be hived off to form an executive agency. This was in the wake of Charles Clarke having been dragged kicking and screaming out of Marsham Street having failed to fall on his sword over the foreign national prisoners scandal.

This country used to have an honourable tradition of government ministers resigning when things got a bit shagged up on their watch. It’s difficult to remember the last time that happened and you really have to go back to 1982 and Peter Carrington’s resignation over the Falklands for a proper object lesson in ministerial responsibility. He didn’t personally screw up, but he was the man in charge and took the kicking for it. Nowadays, it seems, the buggers have to be crowbarred out of the ministerial Jaguar.

We must wait until tomorrow to find out what the Home Secretary has to say about this latest debacle. The current signs are that she’s going to try and hang Brodie Clark out to dry, which would make sense, for otherwise what is agency status for but to distance ministers from operational decisions. That said, please don’t try and convince me that Damian and/or Theresa don’t have SOME input as to who sits on the UKBA board.

I have yet to see David Cameron expressing full confidence in Green and May (makes them sound like they make organic chocolate!). Only when that happens will we know for certain that blaming the officials aint gonna work.

Politics

Red Meat for the Daily Mail – Part 1

This week’s subject on which everyone can be a resident expert is – <drumroll> – IMMIGRATION !! (Again!!)

Just out of curiosity I’ve been reading some of the comments from the web pages of the Daily Fail about this week’s events in the shining halls of Marsham Street. (In case you missed it, Brodie Clark and a few other senior officers of the UK Border Agency are being allowed time off to do some late autumn pruning.)

It just so happens that I do know quite a lot about immigration and UKBA. But, even knowing as much as I do, I wouldn’t describe myself as an expert. (Incidentally,  if you think I’m about to let you in on some naughty secrets you can sod off right now ‘cos that aint never gonna happen. )

There are good and bad civil servants just as there are good and bad in any job or profession.

No, this one is about the “person on the Clapham omnibus”.

It is an interesting fact of life working in the civil service that almost everyone considers themselves qualified to comment on your job. They’ll tell you what you should be doing, how you should be doing it and that, generally, you’re overpaid for doing it badly. Out come the bromides about jobs for life, the gravy train, tea swilling bureaucrats  and gold-plated pensions. Suffice to say here that, having worked in the public and private sectors in more or less equal measure, neither one has a monopoly on efficiency and effectiveness. There are good and bad civil servants just as there are good and bad in any job or profession.  The majority of the people I now work with are genuine and hard-working, many of them putting their personal safety at risk every day.

So, what is it that makes everyone an expert on my job? It’s the “I pay your wages so, therefore, I’m your boss” syndrome. My stock answer to that is that you don’t and aren’t. It’s a bank manager in Droitwich who pays for me – you pay for a PCSO in Sidcup! And my boss sits over there in the window seat.

I have absolutely  no objection to the public commenting on what we do. I just wish it was from a position of knowledge and understanding. More often than not it isn’t. Take, as just one example, the far from uncommon comment I saw this morning which runs something along the lines of “we’re an island, it’s the easiest thing in the world to close our borders”. Oh, is it really? Yes, this is an island, but it has 30 major and 27 minor airports along with more than 400 airfields, aerodromes and heliports. We have more than a hundred operating seaports and hundreds more small harbours, jetties and slipways. We have over 11,000 miles of coastline. To close that little lot to every potential illegal entrant would require a border force very many times the size we have or could afford.[pullquote]Plus ça change[/pullquote]

Sweeping statements made without a proper understanding or, worse, on the basis of “common sense” solve precisely nothing. Unfortunately, our politicians behave no better. Some of the comments passed over the last few days have been simplistic drivel – nothing more than opportunistic point scoring – blame and counter-blame in the never-ending game of party politics.

Oh well, Plus ça change, as they say in Coquelles!

Politics

1/10 – must do better!

If ever there was a need to demonstrate the paucity of thought and ideas amongst our political classes then yesterday Chris Bryant MP more than fulfilled it.

This week the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee released a report which was highly critical of the UK Border Agency. Amongst other things they raised was the fact that the Agency has lost track of about 124,000 applicants and their files have been sent to a “controlled archive”.  Bryant, who is Shadow Minister for Immigration,  went straight out on the appearance fee trail and gave us this offering on Aunty’s Breakfast:-

[youtube width=”212″ height=”172″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCpmhu4DgnE[/youtube]

You will note that, several times, he was asked how he would go about tracking the missing and each time he ducked the question. Rentaquote, at its worst, despite the rather sycophantic praise for this pathetic offering that he subsequently tweeted.

I have to admit that I know rather more about this than your average Joe Soap. That 124k represents less than 0.2% of the country’s population. Some of them will have left the UK, some will have settled in a different identity, some will be dead. Needles and haystacks!

I was, therefore, interested to know how Bryant would go about tracing them all. So I tweeted him:-

“@ChrisBryantMP Just exactly how WOULD you go about finding all those missing people, Chris?”

Remarkably quickly a reply came back:-

“@nokhbi For a start I wouldn’t decide to stop looking for them and secondly I wouldn’t cut staff by 5000, 20%”

Now, that really doesn’t answer the question, does it? So I tweeted him again:-

“@ChrisBryantMP Yes, but HOW would you find them?”

And answer came there none!

It is infantile to suggest that the problem of the missing can be laid entirely at the door of the present government. It goes way back through all three terms of the Labour government and, in fact, has its origin under John Major’s Tory administration.

Bear in mind that, if the coalition falls apart and if there’s a general election and if Labour win (rather a lot of ifs!) this man would be measuring for curtains in Marsham Street. He would be responsible for setting the policy of the UK Border Agency. Imagine the scene:-

Whiteman (for it is he!): “Yes, Minister, we appreciate that you want the missing applicants traced. Could you suggest some methods we haven’t already tried?”

Bryant: “Err …”

It’s very easy to stand on the sidelines and jeer, but if you aspire to high office you really ought to have something better in your ideas box than “do better”!

Religion

Are you still here?

Wasn’t the world supposed to end yesterday?

After his much publicised prediction that the last judgement was going to happen on 21 May (see here), Harold Camping has been somewhat more quietly saying that he got his numbers wrong and that the real date was 21 October.

To be fair Harold did say this time that that the end will come “very, very quietly”. Apparently God’s judgement and salvation were completed on May 21, Mr Camping said in a message explaining the mix-up in his biblical math. He said that Christ put the ‘unsaved’ into judgement on that date, but that it will not be physically seen until yesterday. He wrote on his website “Thus we can be sure that the whole world, with the exception of those who are presently saved (the elect), are under the judgement of God, and will be annihilated together with the whole physical world on October 21.”

Still waiting and still not holding my breath! But now it’s Saturday the 22nd, the sun is shining, there are birds squabbling in the kids’ playground at the end of the road and we still owe the bloody mortgage!

Law

Dale’s End

I quote from the coverage on The Guardian’s website on Wednesday morning:-

“10.38am: I’ve just been speaking to the Guardian’s Johnny Howorth, who’s witnessed scenes of “abject chaos” at Dale Farm this morning. The clashes of earlier have now given way to a stand-off, he says.

At present, there seems to be more or less a stalemate between protesters and bailiffs and the police who are figuring out what to do next.

There’s a real sense of despondency on behalf of the Travellers … They never thought it would come to this.” (Emphasis added).

And yesterday afternoon they all just filed out.

So – someone please tell me why they couldn’t have done that 10 years ago when they were first notified that they were there illegally, or 8 years ago when John Prescott gave them 2 year’s grace to leave voluntarily, or when they lost any one of their decreasingly credible challenges in Courts?

The clue is in the last sentence of the quote. I’ve spent a good many years in enforcement and the most common emotion is complete shock that, despite all the warnings they’ve received, this is actually happening to them. Enforcement is always something that’s done to someone else.

One last observation. Dale Farm resident Kathleen McCarthy said: ‘The memory of Dale Farm will weigh heavily on Britain for generations.”

Don’t bank on it, dear. You were already tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappers long before they shot Gaddafi.

Law

Not for Nothing is it called Enforcement.

Well, at seven this morning, it finally happened.

Despite all the bravado and bullshit about the barricades, the police took precisely seven minutes to get into Dale Farm. The rest has been fairly predictable – the howls of outrage about “police brutality” being the most predictable of all. It was clear from the coverage at seven this morning that the activists were all too ready to start hurling bricks before the police had even entered the site. This despite the weasel words on the Dale Farm Solidarity site, namely “We need people to come willing to engage in civil disobedience as well as support residents and activists in resisting the eviction through non-arrestable roles.” I venture to suggest that chucking bricks, beating people with a shovel and pissing on them are all arrestable offences. (Unless, of course, you happen to frequent some of the more hard-core clubs in Berlin, in which case they’re about 200 Euros an hour (allegedly)!) Continue reading Not for Nothing is it called Enforcement. →

Politics

Mary Flynn

Further to my earlier post I received the following tweet from GypsyMessages Gypsy Message Board:

“@nokhbi thats not Mary Flynn its Mary MacCarthy! cant get ya facts right!”

I’m happy to be corrected if, indeed, that is the case.

However, the photo was lifted from here. Also see here, here and  here.

I note that they didn’t dispute any of the rest of it.

 

Law

Dale Farm

Tomorrow is going to be an ugly day in Essex. It need not be so, but there are forces in society which just do not know when to give up. And sadly, in these days of spin doctors, they use every device at their disposal to mislead.

The site clearance of Dale Farm (see below) need not be a cause for violence. Indeed, it need not be happening at all, but for the fact that the travellers seem to regard themselves as above the law. It is not my intention today to revisit the legality of Basildon Council’s actions as, quite clearly, they are acting lawfully. (Whether there are other aspects of law that affect the issue of sites for travellers is a different matter and should not be used to muddy the waters.)

Continue reading Dale Farm →

Law

The Law According to Vanessa

I realise that this might upset a few people, so some of you might want to pop out for the next five minutes.

Vanessa Redgrave and the grey cardigan of concern made an appearance in Essex this week. No doubt she feels strongly about the site clearance of land owned by Irish travellers at Dale Farm, and I applaud anyone who shows the courage of their convictions, but she’s not being entirely honest with us and has, as a consequence, annoyed me sufficiently to blog about it. Ms Redgrave insists that the travellers have not broken any law. She is wrong, and if this is the limit of her understanding of law she would be very well advised to stick to acting, because this is the real world and to transpose her distorted view onto it would set a very dangerous precedent.

The argument about Dale Farm has been rumbling on for a decade and is now so shrouded in melodramatic hogwash and human rights mumbo-jumbo that we need to get back to the core of the issue – planning law. Shorn of all the emotive issues being thrust into the headlines, let’s take a look at what has actually happened. Continue reading The Law According to Vanessa →

Politics

B@st@rds from Bristol

Last night the BBC justified the licence fee! (In my opinion, anyway.)

Panorama is the longest running current affairs documentary programme in the world. It has an honourable record of investigative journalism which stretches back more than five decades. Last night they added another powerful and important chapter.

For those who didn’t see the programme it’s been difficult to avoid the fallout.

It brought to light the abuse of patients with learning disabilities at the privately run Winterbourne View in Bristol. I have long since ceased to be amazed at the human capacity for the inhumane, but I found the programme extremely harrowing. Bullying, abuse, physical and verbal assault are not easy things to watch, especially when perpetrated against those least able to defend themselves. Continue reading B@st@rds from Bristol →