Doesn’t the Home Office have anything better to do?

[The photo here was tweeted by @ukhomeoffice along with the caption: A suspected visa overstayer arrested at Swansea nail bar – 94 suspected #immigrationoffenders arrested across UK" - Laura]

Picture this scene: it’s 2050. The economy is just coming out of a recession. Times are hard, unemployment is high, graduates can’t get jobs and public sector pay is frozen. In an effort to be ‘down with the kids’ the government is using social media to get across that it’s tough on crime/pro NHS/improving education (insert generic centre-left/centre-right policy here).

The Home Office has employees dedicated to running its Twitter account. And they’re tweeting pictures of a young man being arrested, because he’s ‘guilty’ of immigration offences.

He’ll be taken into the custody of UKBA, whose jurisdiction exists entirely separately from the criminal justice system, and arguably, lacks its safeguards. He’s probably scared, struggling to get legal representation, and yet to have any charges proved against him.

Only this didn't happen in an Orwellian 2050. This happened yesterday.

I find it difficult to express the abject contempt I feel towards the person who decided to take that decision to tweet the scene. And I feel fairly strongly that whoever took the decision to publish that picture should lose their job. For utter lack of human compassion, if for no other reason.

We are an overpopulated country. Net immigration vastly exceeds net emigration. As such our government has introduced stringent requirements vastly restricting the amount of skilled labour that can work in the UK from outside of the EU. We have an immigration problem. People illegally working, not paying tax and using our very limited resources is a problem. A big problem.

But that in no way, at all, makes it acceptable to name and shame them on the internet. In the UK I'm proud to be a citizen of we have due process. We have lawyers and evidence. Trials and judges. We empanel juries and listen to testimonies. We don’t march people onto the street and deem them guilty like lynch mobs in the dark ages, centuries ago. We listen to appeals for asylum and consider human rights. We spent years engaging with foreign states to ensure we can safely deport radical clerics.

We do not, ever, pander to right wing xenophobic extremism. We do not expect applause for removing human beings by force. We recognise it as the nasty, unpleasant reality of border control. Except we don’t.

Our Home Office wastes tax payer money communicating bigoted images to the twittersphere. I’m appalled. I hope, for the sake of our country, that I’m not the only one.

By Bess Obsborne.