The Home Office has been having a disastrous time lately. There is a widespread belief that they have totally failed to implement the government's policies on immigration, and that they have not the slightest idea how many illegal immigrants there are in the UK, or where they may be found. John Reid's predecessor, Charles Clarke, was sacked over their failure to deport more than 1,000 foreign prisoners when they were released from British jails. Now they've calmly forgotten to add to the police database the details of British murderers, rapists, robbers and paedophiles who have been convicted abroad and subsequently returned to the UK. John Reid has described them as "not fit for purpose" and wants to split them into two separate organisations, although most of us know that the main effect of this will be to double the number of civil servants being paid to polish very expensive chairs.
And what's the solution to this problem? Sack the bastards? Put some sort of system in place to force them to get their heads down and get on with the job they're paid to do, instead of having jolly meetings and drinking tea all the time? Take the work away and give it to a commercial contractor who has to get results or not be paid?
Well no, none of those.
In fact the solution to be adopted is rather different. They're going to advertise.
It's reported in the press this weekend (21st January) that Saatchi & Saatchi, the advertising agency that helped win power for Thatcher in 1979 with their "Labour Isn't Working" posters, is to be employed by the Home Office to to put a gloss on immigration and persuade voters that ministers will succeed in strengthening Britain's borders (whether they do or not. Which they won't).
A confidential document from the Central Office of Information shows that the agency has been retained to work on a "reassurance message", one of several advertising firms involved in the project. The document says "Recent media coverage - foreign national prisoners, illegal workers - has exposed serious weaknesses in the immigration system and these have further seriously weakened the public's confidence in the government's ability to control immigration." It speaks of "the public's widely-held view that immigration is out of control" and "a hostile media looking for the government to fail" (hmm, I wonder why?).
This is tragic, and insulting, and ridiculous - but above all, it's deeply sinister. The failures of the Home Office have caused, are causing and will continue to cause, tragedy. Tragedies like that of Dawn Woodcock, the woman with an American father and British mother, who came here as a baby and lived here ever since, for a total of 42 years, married two British men (presumably not at the same time) and has four British children and 11 British grandchildren. She went back to America to visit her dad, and the immigration authorities wouldn't let her back in (the last information we can find about her is dated January 2006. Does anyone know what happened to her in the end?).
Tragedies like the murders by the 18-year-old son of an Angolan asylum seeker, Roberto Malasi, who killed a woman while robbing a christening party, and then went on to stab to death an 18-year-old girl because, he said, she was "disrespecting" him. Tragedies such as the impending forced repatriation of Mark Coleman who is as British as you or me but is being deported on a technicality to Zimbabwe where he has no family, no job and a pretty precarious future - all because he followed the rules, reported to the police station regularly like a good boy, and isn't either black or gay, for we are reliably informed that either of these conditions would substantially improve his case for asylum.
It's insulting because it assumes that the British public is that easily fooled. It's ridiculous because the enormous cost of this dishonest exercise could have been spent on improving performance instead of deliberate obfuscation.
And it's sinister because of what it means for the future. It means that there exists among politicians and civil servants a mind-set that says "whether we do our job well or not is immaterial. All we have to do is cover our tracks, and tell the public whatever we want them to believe. We're fire-proof, and if we lie convincingly enough, they'll swallow anything".
After all the fuss about Big Brother on Channel 4 this week, it's salutary to remind oneself of the other Big Brother, the real Big Brother of George Orwell's 1984, who held the reins of power by the simple expedient of telling enormous porkies and threatening people a lot. Worrying, isn't it, to think that he is alive and well and living not too far from Whitehall?
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