Older readers may
remember the popular radio series “The Men from the Ministry”, which
aired between 1962 and 1977; it was a sort of radio precursor of “Yes,
Minister”. In one episode, a civil servant told his boss that they’d
received a request from another department to borrow the ‘Permission Refused’
stamp and asked what he should do about it. The answer, of course, was “Stamp
it 'Permission Refused' and tell them we haven’t got one”.
It was on the edge
of the believable, unlike the story
last week about the real-life Home Office in 2023. It seems that, in the PM’s
haste to claim that the asylum backlog has been cleared, one part of the Home
Office has simply deleted all asylum claims from people who it can no longer trace.
Another part of the Home Office is then visiting those people in the Home Office
provided accommodation where they are staying and serving them eviction notices
on the grounds that they have absconded and can no longer be contacted. It’s
life imitating art, but I doubt that such a story would ever have got past the
script editors of that radio programme. They preferred to keep their stories
almost believable.
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1 comment:
There is an increasingly visible link between old TV/radio comedy scripts and current/recent government policy decisions. As this goes on we may even get to a point where fictional characters will be replicated on the Commons benches. While those old programmes were entertaining the antics of the current crop of politicians are most definitely not.
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