Missing the point ...
Amazingly, I heard one comment over the bank holiday weekend from someone who was even more out of touch than Labour ministers ...
This was the lady who rang a BBC phone in programme and complained that the released prisoners were being regarded as a threat to the public because they are foreigners.
No madam, the fact that some of these people are regarded as a serious threat to the public has nothing to do with the fact that they are foreigners. It is because they have either pleaded guilty, or found by a court to have been proven beyond reasonable doubt to be guilty, of serious crimes including murder, rape, drug dealing, and child abuse.
I am every bit as concerned about the threat posed on their release by British nationals who have committed serious offences, either in this country or abroad. Clearly we do not have the option of deporting the former group, and the countries where British criminals have committed offences are fully entitled to deport them back here. But then the authorities need to keep an eye on them.
If the linkages between our various authorities are so bad that they can't put foreign criminals on a plane home even where the courts have specifically recommended it, what is the likelihood that we are any better at monitoring home-grown criminals on their release, let alone those who have been deported here after commiting offences elsewhere ?
If press reports at the weekend are accurate, at least one of those who was released when he should have been considered for deportation, and has subsequently reoffended by shooting someone, is also wanted by police in his native country in connection with a serious crime committed there before he came to Britain.
If anyone doubts that it is possible to believe that many immigrants to this country have a huge amount to offer, that many of them are law-abiding people who want to do a fair day's work for an honest wage, and also to find the government's conduct of immigration policy a complete disaster, you need only to consider this. A fortnight ago we saw NHS doctors from overseas demonstrating because they are afraid that Patricia Hewitt is about to send them home before they've finished their training, and yet Charles Clarke's department is too incompetent to send home convicted criminals.
Mr Clarke was quite willing to outflank even hardline opponents of immigration by sending asylum seekers back to Zimbabwe when every newspaper from the Guardian to the Daily Mail throught that they really were in danger of persecution from Robert Mugabe's regime, and yet he took three weeks to tell Tony Blair that there was a serious problem with arrangements for handling prisoners at the conclusion of their sentences.
We have a government which cracks down on law-biding people who have helped keep the NHS afloat and is not capable of cracking down on convicted murderers.
The best words I can find for Charles Clarke in particular, and increasingly also Hewitt, Blair and the whole pack of them are the words which Oliver Cromwell is supposed to have used in dismissing the Rump parliament and which were addressed again to a failed government in 1940.
"You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Go, in the name of God, Go!"
This was the lady who rang a BBC phone in programme and complained that the released prisoners were being regarded as a threat to the public because they are foreigners.
No madam, the fact that some of these people are regarded as a serious threat to the public has nothing to do with the fact that they are foreigners. It is because they have either pleaded guilty, or found by a court to have been proven beyond reasonable doubt to be guilty, of serious crimes including murder, rape, drug dealing, and child abuse.
I am every bit as concerned about the threat posed on their release by British nationals who have committed serious offences, either in this country or abroad. Clearly we do not have the option of deporting the former group, and the countries where British criminals have committed offences are fully entitled to deport them back here. But then the authorities need to keep an eye on them.
If the linkages between our various authorities are so bad that they can't put foreign criminals on a plane home even where the courts have specifically recommended it, what is the likelihood that we are any better at monitoring home-grown criminals on their release, let alone those who have been deported here after commiting offences elsewhere ?
If press reports at the weekend are accurate, at least one of those who was released when he should have been considered for deportation, and has subsequently reoffended by shooting someone, is also wanted by police in his native country in connection with a serious crime committed there before he came to Britain.
If anyone doubts that it is possible to believe that many immigrants to this country have a huge amount to offer, that many of them are law-abiding people who want to do a fair day's work for an honest wage, and also to find the government's conduct of immigration policy a complete disaster, you need only to consider this. A fortnight ago we saw NHS doctors from overseas demonstrating because they are afraid that Patricia Hewitt is about to send them home before they've finished their training, and yet Charles Clarke's department is too incompetent to send home convicted criminals.
Mr Clarke was quite willing to outflank even hardline opponents of immigration by sending asylum seekers back to Zimbabwe when every newspaper from the Guardian to the Daily Mail throught that they really were in danger of persecution from Robert Mugabe's regime, and yet he took three weeks to tell Tony Blair that there was a serious problem with arrangements for handling prisoners at the conclusion of their sentences.
We have a government which cracks down on law-biding people who have helped keep the NHS afloat and is not capable of cracking down on convicted murderers.
The best words I can find for Charles Clarke in particular, and increasingly also Hewitt, Blair and the whole pack of them are the words which Oliver Cromwell is supposed to have used in dismissing the Rump parliament and which were addressed again to a failed government in 1940.
"You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Go, in the name of God, Go!"
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