Crisis!

All right then, can anyone tell me why we are suddenly in a crisis regarding illegal immigration? We weren't, as far as I can tell, yesterday. Now we are, and the BBC is running BNP-it's-OK-to-like deep stater Andrew Green's pet thinktank and a special feature from resigned-on-principle-five-minutes-before-his-line-manager-got-there IO Steve Moxon, intercut with fuzzy video of folk scrambling the fences at the Coquelles railyard. That's right, film from..was it 2002 or 2003?

Apparently Dave from PR announced the crisis at prime minister's questions this lunchtime. So that's it. Like the bleedin' dreidel song, crisis, crisis, crisis. The meat of the story, such as it is, is that the government doesn't know how many illegal immigrants there are.

Well, obviously. If the government had seen their papers, they wouldn't be "illegal" immigrants, would they? No government in the world knows how many illegal immigrants, or emigrants for that matter, it has. Because they're illegal, see? The stupidity level here is so high, by the way, that anyone who reads this post will rapidly approach their maximum weekly dose of stupidity and have to recuperate in a clue-chamber for months if they are to have any chance of regaining their former IQ.

More importantly, there is a real non-wanker story waiting for a good reporter to dig in. That is how a succession of four utterly unscrupulous Home Secretaries mismanaged the IND in order to please the prime minister and the Murdoch'n'Associated press, through a cocktail of absurd numerical targets applied to people in quasi-judicial positions, exterminationist rhetoric, management by fear, and destabilisation of the chain of command.

But unfortunately, the people who suffered most were scared brown people, and also civil servants, a lot of whom were also brown people and not really first-division our kinda people, being in delivery, not policy, old chap. So that's that. Nobody really does close reporting of Whitehall anyway, especially not after it zapped Gilligan.

I'll just say - was it really impossible to imagine that the end of the Cold War and the outbreak of a major war in Europe might mean more refugees? Michael Howard didn't do anything until they were here and the system couldn't decide claims within three years. I think it was quite deliberate, or wilful neglect at least, as he hoped his first attempt to starve them out might save the 1997 elections.