Fascistic U.K. policies mar Remembrance Day
Last week in Camden, the heart of cosmopolitan London, four British immigration officials dressed in flak jackets stormed a wedding reception with an invited journalist in tow convinced that the bride and her husband-to-be were conducting a sham wedding for the purposes of staying in the U.K.
The bride was Miao Guo, a Chinese sales consultant for Prada who was set to wed Italian Massimo Ciabattini, a retail manager at Harrods, the luxury department store. The British Home Office (the U.K.’s Interior Ministry), had invited The Camden New Journal’s Alice Hutton along to observe a successful raid, hoping for some good press in the aftermath of grim headlines in the summer and fall. How grim?
First, during a controversial summer campaign, vans toured London neighbourhoods with a billboard message: “In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest.”
Popularly known as the “go home vans,” each had a picture of handcuffs and touted the number of arrests “last week in your area.”
These were not a big hit. Vince Cable, a senior coalition government politician (the U.K. is ruled by Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition), had called the campaign “stupid and offensive,” while a local council leader in one of the targeted neighbourhoods told the BBC that he was “absolutely horrified” by the scheme.
Even Nigel Farage, the populist firebrand leader of the anti-immigration U.K. Independence Party, said that the billboards were “nasty.”
In the end, the billboards were banned by the U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority due to inaccurate arrest statistics, but the damage had been done.
More bad press came from another immigrationrelated blunder, where British nationals, including an anti-racism campaigner and an immigration caseworker, were mistakenly sent text messages on their mobile phones telling them that, “You are required to leave the UK as you no longer have the right to remain,” or that, “Our records show you may not have leave to remain in the UK. Please contact us to discuss your case.”
The first was sent to Bobby Chan, an immigration caseworker at Central London Community Law, who had been in the U.K. since 1973. The second was sent to Suresh Grover, a British national who founded the anti-racism charity The Monitoring Group.
Despite denials that text messages were sent to the wrong people (it soon emerged that the campaign was outsourced to a private contractor called Capita as part of a 30 million pound deal), new complaints kept on surfacing and the Home Office was not only criticized for the nasty and creepy practice of sending such messages, but also for general incompetence and for wasting taxpayer money.
Again, even UKIP leader Nigel Farage was outraged.
“To send threatening text messages and emails to people on some sort of clearly ill-managed central database is deeply disturbing and the sort of behaviour one would expect from a fascistic po- lice state, not a democratic and inclusive nation,” he told the BBC. “Quite frankly, it’s abhorrent.”
On that note, back to our wedding party.
As Guo and Ciabattini were getting ready to tie the knot last Thursday, plainclothes officials were waiting outside the registry office with reporter Alice Hutton in tow.
Hutton reported that as Guo and Ciabattini exchanged vows, border officials “suddenly interrupted and pulled them apart for questioning in separate rooms.” The officials also pulled away two bridesmaids. “After 30 minutes of rigorous questioning, redfaced government officials retreated and admitted their mistake,” Hutton wrote.
And as the botched raid concluded, a British Home Office spokesman admitted to Hutton that: “It is either the best sham wedding I have ever seen or it is real.”
Another Home Office spokesperson was kind enough to later admit that “at the time no arrests were made.”
How nice for the bride and groom.
Horrific stories such as these continue to trickle in as Britain heads toward Remembrance Day, when we can expect politicians like British Prime Minister David Cameron to pay tribute to those who, as he put it in 2011, “protect the freedoms that we enjoy today.”
But shouldn’t the freedom from having one’s wedding raided (in front of a journalist, no less) or being told to leave one’s country via text message be among these?
In the U.K., it’s getting tough to tell.