Skip to main content

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
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...
20 comments
Read more

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop...
Post a Comment
Read more

Are the Liberal Democrats Libertarian?

A few days ago Cicero met with one of the better known figures in the Libertarian Alliance, Brian Mickelthwait . Brian writes for various blogs that I enjoy reading- including Samizdata . Ahead of our meeting Brain expressed "scepticism" about the Libertarian credentials of the Liberal Democrats: "My charge was that when you meet a Liberal Democrat you never know what he will believe. The one who talks to you is likely to say what you want to hear. But the others will simultaneously be telling other people with quite different views what they want to hear. So don't vote for these lying creeps." Political parties- all of them- are coalitions of people who quite often disagree with each other. Apparently we are not supposed to "air our dirty linen in public", but actually one of the reasons that the Liberal Democrats appealed to me was that they were prepared to talk about issues and policies amongst themselves in public. The eclipse of the Liberal Party...
18 comments
Read more