Repeated failures expose incompetence
Oto be in England, now that April’s here!’’ The temptation to pick primroses, make a summer trifle and book the Proms provokes a brief blithe patriotism. Then you read about the vapid, self-seeking short-sightedness of how Britain is run and cringe in shame. The sugared primroses may still look good on the national trifle, but the sponge is stale, the custard rancid, and the sherry is neat meths.
Too much in public life is dispiriting, dishonest and dangerous.
A report in The Times on April 21 on the scale of criminal trafficking, with abused young captives sold on for profit, was a shock but no surprise. It follows a pattern all too familiar. The routine task of record-keeping and controlling borders gets ignored or lazily outsourced for decades. Dodgy money is welcomed, creating a bubble of wealth to tempt exploiters.
When media publicise modern slavery, a grandstanding ‘‘model’’ law against it is passed. Everyone applauds. But three years later referrals of trafficked children to the national safeguarding programme have risen 66 per cent in a year, with traffickers promising kids modelling contracts or football trials, then flogging them as prostitutes or slaves.
And despite the famous law, only a handful of cases are followed up.
Why? Not because the gangmasters are geniuses, but because the police face complicated cases with a shortage of officers, interpreters and administrators, and cannot chase the criminals across borders.
Trafficked victims are tricky witnesses anyway, scared and confused. Having crossed our absurdly ill-managed borders they fear that without papers they might be sent ‘‘home’’ and reenslaved. Or charged with a crime. Some have been.
Their immigration status is unclear, however abused, because a national referral mechanism on modern slaves that we cobbled up does not give them rights.
Half-baked goodwill is our national speciality. Laws and regulations are knitted rapidly with a dozen loose ends.
The other current disgrace, the treatment of the [Empire] Windrush [the ship that brought the first wave of West Indian immigrants to the UK in 1948] generation, stems from false economies and maladministrations.
These go all the way back to Tony Blair’s cavalier attitude to borders, abandoning exit checks and ludicrously underestimating the scale of EU migration and the fears of British workers when employers saw a pool of people willing to sleep ten to a room and work for a pittance. The unease was fuelled by populist mischief, but ignored or scorned by the affluent classes and their liberal political pals in power.
In a blast of counterpopulism, government then issued a panicky instruction to immigration officials to turn nitpickingly ‘‘hostile’’.
This coincided, of course, with a time when the immigration service, like the police, was gasping for breath, choking on a paper backlog and desperately recruiting any untrained civil servants it could to man immigration desks.
In the Windrush affair, all that happened is that government blithely cast out a net to catch the real problem illegals - including just those slave traffickers with whom we began - and accidentally but unforgivably created a situation where inexperienced and pressured officials (solid older ones having left) found themselves tormenting and insulting British citizens. Citizens whose only crime was to be black and not addicted to keeping old rent books, and to need a public service or proudly apply for a first passport to visit granny in Jamaica.
Apologies are forced from our stumblebum government machine. (Would you let these people run a kebab stall? Doesn’t it sometimes make you wish that you were Swiss?)
It must now sort the problem out fast and decently, but do it without useful records, because a Labour government seemingly decided to shred them while misreading its own data protection law.
It has knocked a hole in Commonwealth relations and sent a tremor of justifiable anxiety through black Britons. But all ministers do is to blame each other and some gigantic virtual dog that ate their homework.
The shaming thing is that it is indeed less a matter of ill will than of years of slipshod homework.
We are told that Home Office staff tried to warn Gordon Brown’s ministers about binning the records, and were ignored.
Police and central and local authorities have repeatedly warned about austerity. It has taken more than 15 years for the Home Office’s vaunted ‘‘e-borders’’ programme to not quite work.
If you want a sour laugh next time someone says ‘control our borders’’, turn to the last full National Audit Office report on the project, in 2015. More than £830 million spent and rising, a costly legal dispute, targets missed, a rapid churn of leadership, ‘‘inability to make decisions due to gaps in capability and resourcing’’.
And - the gentle killer line from the fearless Sir Amyas Morse, the auditor-general - the Home Office has ‘‘a culture that does not demand and use high quality data’’.
That a government department should be so described is serious. That a series of home secretaries lived complacently with its inefficiencies is culpable. One of them, John Reid, split the Ministry of Justice from the Home Office, calling the latter ‘‘not fit for purpose’’. But then he flounced off to the back benches after a year. So, it feels more appropriate to apply the phrase to the past dozen or so home secretaries. Even if one of them made it to No 10.