A shameful insult to real Nazi victims

SO appalling and utterly asinine was the comparison made yesterday by the former head of the civil service, Bob Kerslake, between Britain’s immigration system and Nazi Germany, that the Mail hesitates to dignify his words with a response.

But ultimately they cannot be allowed to pass unchallenged, not least because they are such a grave insult to the memory of the millions murdered by Hitler.

It says much about this over-promoted bureaucrat that he was too cowardly to own the remarks himself, instead snidely attributing them to anonymous former Coalition ministers.

Clearly it is a view with which he sympathises – or why repeat it? The answer is that Lord Kerslake (a former adviser to John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn and not the neutral figure presented by the BBC) wanted to make a cheap political point about the Windrush scandal.

The Mail has been second to none in criticising Amber Rudd and the Home Office for their lacklustre response to warnings – issued as long ago as 2015 and repeated in January – that people from Caribbean countries with every right to be here were being targeted by immigration officials. Miss Rudd – and the Prime Minister – were right to apologise and, belatedly, confront this shameful ill treatment.

But there is obviously no comparison with the horrors of Nazism. In truth, the Left has cynically sought to exploit this fiasco to argue against border controls, including the entirely sensible constraints on illegal migration introduced by Mrs May when she was home secretary.

Such controls are both justified and necessary to deal with a system ripe for abuse by people like Albanian Fatmira Tafa, who, as reported yesterday, used a fake Greek ID to get a kidney transplant costing the NHS £72,000.

Only a mindless bureaucracy lacking political oversight could ignore the hundreds of thousands here illegally, and focus instead on Commonwealth citizens. As for Lord Kerslake – a man known across Whitehall as Bungalow Bob because there was so little upstairs – he should be thoroughly ashamed of himself.