The border shambles that betrayed Britain

Revelations of just how easy it was for illegal immigrants to enter Britain have made disturbing reading. To learn from yesterday’s official report that border controls have been even more lax than was assumed is profoundly depressing.


Truly, it is a litany of incompetence. Half a million people travelling by Eurostar let in without being checked against a list of murderers and terrorists...


Countless students waved through without having visas examined... officials suspending vital security programmes without ministers’ approval... hugely expensive biometric passport machinery turned off on 15,000 occasions...

Abandoned: The official report into border controls has revealed the full extent to which immigration checks have been neglected

The public has every right to feel betrayed by such failure and complacency.

Meanwhile, to add financial insult to injury, we have all been made to pay huge sums for state-of-the-art passport security chips and Orwellian databases which UK Border Agency officials do not even bother to use!


But the suspicion must be that the UKBA is not just incompetent: the very ethos of the organisation is rotten.

Challenge: Home Secretary Theresa May

It’s stuffed with liberal officials appointed when New Labour – in clear defiance of the public’s wishes – operated an open-door immigration system to fuel the economic boom and, cynics argue, increase Labour’s future core vote.


And, when the government changed, they simply carried on with their reckless policies as before.


Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has now decided that UKBA (formed in 2008 out of the wreckage of an Immigration Directorate labelled ‘not fit for purpose’ by one of her predecessors, John Reid) is simply too broken to mend.


From next month, it will be split in two, with a new UK Border Force – headed, at long last, by a chief constable – in charge of who enters and leaves the country. What remains of UKBA will spend its time processing casework.


Nobody should underestimate the challenge faced by Mrs May in implementing these changes.


If she fails, however, the Tory Party - elected almost two years ago on a promise to bring some sanity to our borders – is unlikely to be forgiven.

May admits 500,000 entered UK without full security checks

link