Beneath the Daily Mail headline, “All foreigners give you cancer, they will lower house prices and blow you up” (I was in a rush at my local newsagents so I cannot vouch for the exact wording, but it was something like this) there was a photograph of a lorry being stopped at Dartford in Kent this week, from which “26 migrants poured out.” This is “more proof that we’ve lost control of our borders”. Taken in isolation, you might think there is a lot of truth in that, but what does it actually mean?
Firstly, it is hardly a shock that given the number of trucks that come into Britain many will have stowaways within them. I am not saying this is a good thing – far from it – and in fact I’d rather there were none at all, but as ever the Mail is being disingenuous about one of the main reasons why it is not as difficult as it might be to enter the UK.
The Mail, as you may have noticed, is not exactly a newspaper of the political left, or even the political centre ground if the truth be known. The Mail is where it has always been; on the foghorn hang ’em, flog ’em hard right, somewhat adjacent to Ukip and the far right of the Tory Party. This means it has been highly supportive of the current government’s six year onslaught on frontline public services. Frontline public services are staffed by frontline public servants, but since 2010 there are rather less of them.
David Cameron’s government is very fond of saying how there are far fewer ‘bureaucrats’ than there were when he came to office. Both he and his ministers have been cutting back on ‘waste’ and concentrating on ‘efficiencies’, slashing the number of pen-pushing, bean-counting civil servants and other unnecessary public sector workers. There is only one problem with this: the term ‘civil servant’ is a catch-all phrase that doesn’t tell the full story.
Civil servants are customs and passport officers, too, who work with police officers who also just happen to be public sector workers. Our armed forces are, technically speaking, public sector workers too. All these public sector workers have something in common: since 2010, their numbers have been cut, often to the bone whilst their workloads have dramatically grown, especially in terms of the movement of large numbers of people throughout Europe. It does not require a genius to work out that if you cut back, in some instances quite dramatically, the number of public servants who work in the Home Office, Passport Office and HMRC, not to mention the police etc etc then there must be consequences. It would be great if, for example, the number of potential migrants reduced at the same time as civil service numbers were slashed, but for some reason it doesn’t work like that. No one in Syria or Libya is thinking, “Hmm. I’d best abandon my attempts to reach Britain because there aren’t as many border staff as there used to be.”
So, partly because of the cuts to frontline public sector workers, it will be easier for people to reach our country in the back of lorries and it will be harder for the authorities to catch them.
I am not sure we ever really had full control of our borders, regardless of the Channel Tunnel. Anyone who has wanted to come to Britain bad enough has usually made it and, it is believed, hundreds of thousands of people are here, under the radar, and have been for years, many working and living illegally in shared houses. As long as they keep their heads down, stay away from the authorities, what are the odds of them ever being found?
The Mail has obviously gone down the ‘something must be done’ line, knowing really that the only thing that has been done in recent years has been to make it much easier to come illegally to Britain. The Tory austerity the Mail has supported has had consequences in many areas and illegal migration is undoubtedly one of them. They have supported the Cameron/Osborne line of ‘public bad, private good’ without fully explaining what this may mean for many unseen aspects of our lives.
And, ironically, the increase in illegal migration probably has more to do with the actions of the government that supposedly opposes and condemns it than the Mail would dare admit. The smaller, leaner government the political right desire has consequences. What a shame they won’t admit what those consequences can mean.
