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Now let me get this right...

Coming through Gatwick yesterday... not a pleasent experience.

Gigantic queues to leave the country? Well, yes.

The latest moronic ukase from the Home Office- we should check everyone leaving the country so that we might just catch the odd illegal who should not have been there in the first place.

So let me get this right: tens, or even hundreds of thousands of people are going to be inconvenienced substantially and at considerable cost to the tax payer.

I ask the "border guard" how many"illegals" they have actually caught.

I will give you a clue... it is a round number.

Yep that is right- nil.

So, no cost benefit analysis, no perception of the real cost at all- just a government determined to make an empty gesture in order to be seen as doing "something" in order to tackle a "problem".

A certain occasional American visitor to our shores has the perfect word for this:

D'oh!!

Comments

Anonymous said…
You may be unaware but part of the LEA response to 7/7 and 21/7 was the imposition of some ‘targeted’ outbound checks. Although implemented with a counter terrorist objective the exercise was considered useful from an immigration and crime perspective as well. So although this may seem like a bolt from the blue there is some data around to enable IND to do a cost benefit analysis.
10:32 am
Cicero said…
That is as maybe- but if no one is actually being caught by this exercise, and thousands are being inconvenienced, then please can we some data to confirm that what appears to be an essentially pointless exercise has some value.
4:39 pm
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