Delingpole: UK Home Office Is as Useful as a Chocolate Teapot, Freedom of Info Request Confirms

Home Office
PAUL ELLIS/AFP via Getty Images
James Delingpole

Some of the thousands of Afghan refugees who have been resettled in the UK since the Allied withdrawal pose a security risk. It could be a few of them or it could be a lot of them but we don’t know how many because, we learn from a Freedom of Information request made by Breitbart’s Jack Montgomery, the Home Office is apparently too embarrassed to tell us, claiming it would not be in “the public interest”.

Wait. What? There are few things, you might imagine, that are more in the public interest than national security. The British, though generally tolerant, are increasingly exhausted by the wave on wave of immigrants arriving both legally and illegally. If Priti Patel’s Home Office is incapable of stopping them coming then at the very least it could try to weed out the ones hell-bent on killing us.

Unfortunately, though, it would appear that even this job is beyond the Home Office’s capabilities.

At least one of these evacuees, we know, had been on Britain’s ‘no-fly’ list — an indication that he was considered a potential threat. Another, a former Afghan special forces commando, was arrested in a dawn raid on a Manchester quarantine hotel.

And those are just the ones we know about. Hence Jack Montgomery’s Freedom of Information Act request to the Home Office asking exactly how many airlifted Afghans were subsequently “found to have previously been on ‘no-fly’ or ‘no-entry’ lists” or to “have previously been deported from the United Kingdom.”

The Home Office admits it knows the answer. But it won’t tell us because “after careful consideration” it has decided it’s not in our interests to disclose it.

Its proffered excuse is the usual mealy-mouthed nonsense we’ve come to expect from the Deep State bureaucracy.

Apparently, giving a straight answer might “provide insight into the operational capabilities of Border Force intelligence-based operations and systems.”

Too right it might. And the insight, I suspect, might go something like this:

The Home Office is a chocolate fireguard. It is utterly incapable of defending Britain’s borders. And its intelligence capabilities are laughable.

Some of the refugees Boris Johnson’s government has welcomed to the United Kingdom from Afghanistan may well be “deserving” candidates: Afghans, say, who have risked their lives as guides or interpreters and would now almost certainly be killed by the Taliban were they to stay behind.

But many others may well be at best con-artists keen to take advantage of Britain’s generous welfare system, at worst rapists, paedophiles, murderers, fifth columnists, or terrorists come to wreak havoc on their newly adopted home.

This official response will do little to allay the cynicism of those who believe that the latest Afghan war was an unutterable waste of blood and treasure and that, under cover of “doing the decent thing” for interpreters, the sorry aftermath of President Joe Biden’s botched withdrawal is being used as yet another excuse to advance the globalist masterplan for open borders and internal division.

Nor, of course, does it do anything to inspire confidence in either the Boris Johnson regime nor in the arrogant, overpaid, smug, incompetent, left-wing Civil Service. Both of them are supposed to be answerable to the British public. Neither of them, clearly, gives a stuff about this responsibility.

On the contrary, both the political class and the bureaucratic class grow more remote and arrogant by the day. The response to this FOIA request shows that the government and its administrators no longer bother even to pretend to value transparency.

They are useless; we know they are useless; they know that we know they are useless. And this troubles them not one jot.

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