Home Office Chaos Goes Far Beyond Rudd

The Home Office chaos which has led to the Home Secretary’s resignation last night ‘goes much deeper than Amber Rudd’ according to a Southport councillor.

Councillor Tony Dawson has spent dozens of years dealing on local residents behalf with the Home Office immigration department which he says has never been fit for purpose. He says the problems go well beynd those of the recently-publicised ‘Windrush’ families.

“Long term UK residents, including young Southport families with little money, have been shamelessly and relentlessly targeted for penal action over a number of years by the Immigration authorities while the real criminals have been allowed to flourish. This happened while Theresa May was Home Secretary and it happened even before that,” says Southport councillor Tony Dawson.

Thousands of people who had come to Britain as small children never regularised their status in the UK for decades for all sorts of reasons. These were not just the ‘Windrush’ families who were deliberately brought to Britain to fill key jobs in the 1950s. They included a large number of children of British servicemen and other colonial ex-pats working in Australia, Canada, South Africa.

They came into Britain often as ‘babes-in-arms’ as add-ons to their parents passports as was the rule in those days. These people either did not have birth certificates or lost them but these documents were hardly ever called for in those days in Britain.

So these people went to school and college here, grew up and went to work and paid taxes here, got married and had children here without even the whiff of a problem. Many of them were not well off and did not even dream of getting a passport and travelling abroad. And everyone they grew up with knew that these people were as British as themselves.

“But the Home Office, particularly over the last decade or so has targetted these innocent people,” says Councillor Dawson. “Made their lives a misery, threatened them with deportation and charged them thousands of pounds for their trouble.”

“The Immigration Department have spent a fortune going ‘mob handed’ on raids to workplaces – including workplaces in Southport -where the target of their activity was no flight risk at all. And childen of long-term residents here have also suffered severe problems in trying to go to University.”

“Mother-to be have been threatened with having to spend tens of thousands of pounds to have their babies in hospital. People have been denied disability benefits after workplace accidents.

“And all this targeted activity was coming from a Home Office which, for decades, did not even bother to ‘count out’ the people who were leaving the UK so thery had no idea about the true immigration figures they were meant to be addressing.”

Councillor Dawson says that the Home Office has even bigger problems with its visa offices abroad.

“The privatisation of these services has led to slipshod practices which cause real problems for genuine visitors but have provided an open door to exploit for money launderers, people smugglers, terrorists, identity thieves and organised crime.”