Home Office has really messed up
I HAVE a very simple question. How come it always seems to take donkeys years to eject the really nasty foreigners from Britain – preachers of hate, mobsters, rapists and the like – but the people we should be cherishing and begging to stay all too often get the order of the boot without the option?
Two cases of the latter in one week. First to a lovely young man, Brian White, 21, who has been here for five years. Brian is an orphan who became a straight-A student and won a place at Oxford. He should start at Lady Margaret Hall this autumn but he may well be languishing in his native Zimbabwe by then.
Brian was abandoned as a baby and grew up in an orphanage in Harare. He was fostered by a British couple living there and after more than a decade in Africa the family moved back to the UK. Friends say Brian is a maths genius with a brilliant future and a huge contribution to make to this country.
But a technicality in his immigration status means he is ineligible to receive a penny in student finance and if his plea for mercy fails the Home Office will deport him.
Which would be a complete waste of this country’s education investment in a fine young man, not to mention being patently unfair. Writer Caitlin Moran and novelist Philip Pullman have added their names to his cause. But this is the Home Office. Don’t hold your breath.
Then there’s Lancastrian Shane Ridge, an apprentice joiner born and brought up in this country.
He got his GCSEs here, pays his taxes and national insurance, and passed his driving test first time with flying colours. In his own way, Shane is every bit as important a national asset as high-flying Brian: hard-working, honest and brimming with potential.
But he too faced being kicked out. Why? He was born here, wasn’t he? His father’s British, isn’t he? Yes and yes. Trouble is his mum’s Australian and when Shane was born she and his dad weren’t married. Because of an arcane quirk in the law, the Home Office decided that meant Shane didn’t have automatic right to citizenship.
Two weeks ago a threatening letter arrived on his doormat. It told him to get out of Britain immediately or risk a £5,000 fine, imprisonment and removal by force. Oh, and his driving licence was revoked.
Born here. Bred here. Educated here and apprenticed here. But like Brian White, about to be kicked out.
Then Shane got a break. Hours after he appeared on ITV’s Good Morning Britain where my husband, sitting in for Piers Morgan, and co-host Ranvir Singh almost exploded in outrage on Shane’s behalf the Home Office, backpedalling furiously, phoned Shane to say it was all a dreadful cock-up and of course he could stay.
“I’m really happy but shocked we had to go to the media for the Government to realise their mistake,” Shane says.
Well, it’s his own fault. If only he (and Brian White) had preached a bit of hate now and again they’d have been snug as bugs in rugs here for years.