IT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, OR THE LACK OF IT, TO BLAME FOR WINDRUSH

THE shameful treatment of an unknown number of loyal British citizens who came, or whose parents came, from the Caribbean five decades ago or more, has been called a national disgrace. Not so. To be truly national would have meant that the whole nation, meaning the British people, were aware and responsible. This was yet another bureaucratic shambles, a governmental snafu which a truly overwhelming majority of the British people find profoundly abhorrent. I suspect what happened was this.

Back then all records were paper. The computer had not been invented. So records were stored in paper form, warehouse after warehouse of them. Then came digitisation, the transfer to computer discs. In that process it seems scores, hundreds, thousands of those records simply went astray. Proof of right of residence, duly issued at the time, went missing. That was just error, the human condition.

The shame occurred much more recently when this absence of trace was discovered. The bureaucratic machine, rather than accept the obvious, presumed its own infallibility. No proof of right of residence? Must be an illegal immigrant.

In the days before the abolition of common sense some sensible mandarin would have said: hold on, these good people have been living here, working, paying taxes, abiding by the law, for decades. There must have been a mistake. But computers are not sensible and the computer today is the new god.

We were once told this box of pixels would be a useful servant of mankind. Now it is clear it is the reverse. We are the servants of this wretched and frequently flawed machine. Add to that the Civil Service’s ruthless refusal to admit error and you have the injustice and the scandal.