The farce that is the Home Office’s processing of asylum claims and deportations has been revealed this week in all its stark incompetence.
Ask yourself this: can there be another nation on the planet where, despite being a convicted criminal, you can successfully appeal against being deported because your son likes chicken nuggets, and will only eat them if they’re made in the UK?
Or dodge being sent back to Grenada after overstaying a visa because the Caribbean would be too hot for your new Latvian husband?
Or be granted the right to settle in this country having applied through the scheme specifically designed to help refugees from Ukraine, but you and your family of six have come from Gaza?
Unbelievably, it was way back in 2006 that the then-Home Secretary, Labour’s John Reid, famously declared his department “not fit for purpose” and clearly little has changed in the almost NINETEEN years that have passed.
This legal lunacy can be tracked directly to our membership of the European Convention on Human Rights and that deeply questionable loophole of supposed rights to a family life. Quite how not being able to eat Albanian chicken nuggets or having to apply sun cream and stay in the shade in Grenada can be applied to that appears truly baffling.
While most of these egregious examples of inaction can be laid at the door of the previous administration, the new Labour Government is on the verge of conceding the most ludicrous of own-goals in this area too, as it was also revealed last week who their favoured candidate is to assume the role of the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, aka the ‘Borders Watchdog.’
At a confirmation hearing in front of a panel of MPs, John Tuckett said he would expect to spend most of the time in this key £130,000-a-year job working from home… in FINLAND!
Tuckett, 73, has a home in the Finnish Lakeland close to a city known as “the sauna capital of the world.” I’ve heard of Working From Home, but Working From The Sauna has to take whatever biscuit Fins enjoy.
Defending this palpably absurd working pattern, Tuckett pointed to the current Government job we pay him handsomely for, as Immigration Services Commissioner, where he closed down the offices and moved to a “fully remote” model which he described as “win, win, win.”
Well, it certainly has been for the six Gazans who’ve been able to settle here using a scheme designated for people living 1,200 miles the other side of the world! Perhaps if staff had actually been in their offices (remember them???) this might have been avoided. Sir Keir Starmer sought to defuse this row last week by insisting this watchdog will be kennelled in the UK.
But somehow I don’t think this will be the “Finnish” of this story — and it’s absurd he was ever offered the post in the first place.
Controlled migration, illegal immigration and asylum seekers are consistently the second most important issue to voters, after the economy, and shambolic mishandling of this nature puts a grateful Nigel Farage in front of an open goal.