Less believable than fiction

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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.

Following orders

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The top civil servant in the Home Office has apparently found it necessary to tell the department’s staff that they will not be breaking the law nor be guilty of racism if they implement the Home Secretary’s plan to deport some asylum seekers to Rwanda. The claim that the plan does not break any laws is a bold one for a civil servant to make; ultimately it is for the courts to decide whether the plan is legal or not, and we can be certain that there will be legal challenges aplenty. The question as to whether it is racist or not is more complex. It is arguably not directly racist in the sense that race will not be a factor in the criteria for deciding which of those migrants who arrive by one particular mode of entry will be sent; but since the overwhelming majority of those arriving by that route are of African or Middle Eastern origin (Europeans generally having safer routes available to them, as well as less need to seek sanctuary - current circumstances notwithstanding), there is every probability that it will be indirectly racist.

But perhaps the most significant part of the mandarin’s lecture to staff was the bit where he said that staff were obliged to implement ministers’ decisions. That sounded a lot like telling them that they must always follow orders, an approach to government which many will have thought to have been seriously discredited at Nuremburg. There are lots of things in human history which have been entirely legal under the laws in force at the time – including, of course, slavery – but being ‘legal’ doesn’t make them right, and it doesn’t absolve those implementing them of all moral responsibility for their actions. Where to draw the line is far from being an easy question: a situation in which different civil servants draw the line in different places depending on their own consciences would clearly cause untold difficulties. But the precedents for a government which falls back on instructing its servants to do as they are told regardless of any reservations about legality or morality – which is where we seem to be headed – are not exactly good. The Civil Service is, quite rightly, expected to be neutral rather than partisan in implementing the policy of the elected government of the day. But acting in a neutral fashion isn’t – and should not be allowed to become – the same thing as acting without any sense of morality. The fact that the head honcho at the Home Office doesn’t seem to understand the nuance here is something that should worry us all.

Hold back the popcorn, for the time being

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The constructive dismissal hearing for the former Permanent Secretary at the Home Office looks like being a spectator event not to be missed, if it actually goes ahead.  I’m assuming that the grieved party has lots of juicy evidence about the way the Home Secretary has behaved; the sort of stuff which would embarrass any normal Prime Minister in ordinary times but which, in this case, is likely only (in his own eyes at least) to confirm his good judgement in appointing Patel to the role.  It’s a big ‘if’ though.

At the moment, he’s clearly very angry and looking forward to his day in court but the intensity of anger fades over time, and pragmatic considerations usually kick in eventually.  It was reported that he’s already been in negotiations over a payoff but that those negotiations have foundered – apparently over the lack of an assurance from Johnson and Patel that they would issue a supportive statement if he were to be the subject of further negative briefings.  Unless he can demonstrate that the situation has arisen as a result of discrimination against him on the grounds of one of the ‘protected characteristics’ (race, gender, etc), the amount of money he could win at any tribunal is capped – and that cap is probably significantly lower than any amount he’s already been offered, let alone any new offer which may now be forthcoming.  It is a misconception that UK law protects people against unfair dismissal – it does not.  It allows any employer to sack people at random, with only two provisos – that they avoid doing so on the basis of the protected characteristics (when damages can be unlimited), and that they are willing to open their cheque books and pay a sum significantly in excess of what the sacked employee could ever win at a tribunal.  Faced with the stress and uncertainty of a tribunal in which the employee might not win, or at best win only a smaller uncertain sum of money, the attraction of settling for the certainty of a larger sum usually proves too strong to resist. 

I’m surprised that Johnson and Patel have been unwilling to give him the assurance that he seeks.  After all, giving cast-iron assurances is almost a Johnson specialism – it’s keeping them, rather than giving them, which always seems to cause him a problem.  I’m even more surprised that Rutnam has asked for such an assurance; on the basis of his own personal experience he’d have to be out of his mind to trust one, even if it were given.  If negotiations to arrive at a settlement fail as a result, and the case does indeed get to be heard before a tribunal, there would be a delicious irony if that were to be the direct result of the PM’s serial untrustworthiness.  But it’s too early to break out the popcorn for this particular spectacle yet.

The power of words

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Just after Christmas, the Home Office published this advice to ‘EU citizens’ about the requirement to register if they want to stay in the UK after Brexit.  

The wording is very clear – “If you are an EU citizen living in the UK and want to stay in the UK after the 31 December 2020…”.  I’m not alone in spotting the problem with the use of words here, because I think that I – along with the overwhelming majority of the UK’s population, fall into that category (although I’ll admit that I do sometimes start to wonder about the ‘want to stay’ part given the trajectory on which the UK government has placed us).  But I’m unquestionably an EU citizen as things currently stand.

Professor Richard Murphy has already blogged on this, suggesting that we should all follow the UK Government’s clear advice as EU citizens and register our desire to stay after Brexit.  It’s an interesting form of protest, and it’s hard to see how the UK Government can really complain if millions of those of us who are currently EU citizens simply comply with their poorly-worded demand that we should register.

But underlying this is a rather more general, and slightly sinister, misuse of terminology to describe people.  Here’s another example from Parliament’s website, talking about the proportion of NHS staff who are EU citizens.  It claims that 5.6% of NHS staff are EU nationals but goes on to say that all but 12.7% (i.e. 87.3%) are UK nationals.  But at what point did that 87.3% cease being EU citizens?  The answer is that they did not – they might cease to be such on 29^th March, but as of today, and at the time that this research report was published in October, the proportion of EU citizens working in the NHS was 92.9%, and there was and is effectively no legal distinction between those who happen also to be UK nationals and those who happen to be nationals of other EU member states.

These are far from being the only examples; the BBC and media are full of reports about ‘EU citizens’ which invariably, it seems, is a reference only to non-UK EU citizens.  Does this blurring of terminology matter?  At one level, of course not.  I know what they are trying to say and understand why they are drawing a distinction when talking about the situation which will exist post-Brexit.  But at another level it does matter, partly because (as Prof Murphy pointed out) it’s about creating difference and ‘otherness’ where none currently exists, but also because it diverts attention away from what the government is actually doing here.  The truth isn’t that we are not currently EU citizens, it is that that citizenship is going to be stripped from us at the end of March by deliberate government action.  The form of words which has gained widespread currency treats all other EU citizens as though they are the odd ones, when the reality is that it’s UK nationals whose status is changing the most.

Windrush merely a symptom

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Many years ago, on some management course or other, I remember the lecturer stressing that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”.  As a general rule, it has considerable merit – how can you ever know whether you’re progressing towards a goal if you can’t somehow quantify that progress?  And as anyone subject to any sort of annual performance review will know, all targets are supposed to be SMART, where the M stands for measurable.  It struck me at the time, however, that there was something missing from this simplistic formulation, because the route selected to arrive at the goal is as important – and sometimes more important – than the goal itself.  Concentration on the measurability of progress leads to a target-chasing culture which can, and frequently does, ignore the wider needs of the organisation, its clients, and the people who work within it.

I found myself wondering yesterday whether those senior officials in the Home Office or its agencies who created the local targets of which their bosses were completely unaware (allegedly) for deportations had been on a similar course, but without applying any critical reasoning to the bald statement about the need for measurability.  What they seem to have done, in effect, is to take the overall policy handed down by their political masters (we must get immigration down, and we must deport illegals, and we will do so by creating a hostile environment for them) and turned that into performance targets for staff, following the standard SMART rules.  And, with their annual reviews decided on the basis of achieving the targets they were given, those staff have chased the targets relentlessly.  The staff have attempted to do what they were told was expected of them, and left wider considerations about the impact on those being pursued for deportation and the image and perception of their department to those on higher pay grades.

Now, as it happens, I disagree with the overall policy in principle, but even assuming that the policy itself was a sensible and desirable one, those who promoted it – basically May and Rudd – cannot simply absolve themselves of all responsibility, even it is entirely true that it was the senior officials who turned that policy into cold impersonal targets; not least because those at the very top are, and must always be, held responsible for the culture under which the organisation operates.  And what is clear, surely, by now is that they didn’t really care about the culture; they were completely obsessed with achieving the desired outcomes.  I will, though, also repeat a point made previously: those senior officials who took it upon themselves to implement a system of targets as a means of implementing the policy handed down to them cannot simply be absolved of their responsibility for dehumanising people by turning them into numbers.

There is also a wider political issue as well, which goes way beyond May and Rudd.  I can’t help but wonder whether the unfolding debacle around the Home Office’s attempts to deport more people, using an approach which appals many of us, might nevertheless be playing well amongst one of the Tories’ key target audiences.  All of this has, after all, come about because politicians have been keen to chase the votes of those opposed to immigration by being tough on immigrants.  An anti-immigrant culture has developed and spread, actively encouraged by politicians (and Labour have been as bad – just remember Ed Miliband’s famous mug)  in which it is perfectly possible that many will see the efforts of May and Rudd to be praiseworthy rather than contemptible.  Decades of anti-immigration rhetoric will not be overturned by a few cosmetic changes to policy, nor even by the resignations of May, Rudd, and the top officials involved.  The required cultural shift in political debate is much greater than that.

We need more than words

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Yesterday’s climb-down by the Home Secretary over the Windrush generation was sudden and dramatic.  It is a welcome change of direction, as is the agreement by the Prime Minister to meet representatives of the Caribbean countries to discuss the issue, given that, as recently as last week, she was absolutely refusing to do so.  A lot of credit is due to the Guardian, in particular, for exposing details of some of the worst cases.

If it weren’t so tragic, and hadn’t had so much impact on the lives of ordinary citizens who had every right to be in the UK, some of the revelations would be comic.  The Home Office advice produced during the current Prime Minister’s tenancy of that office advising those being returned to Jamaica to ‘put on a Jamaican accent’; the fact that the government admit that they’ve probably deported people who had every right to be here, but can’t be certain about how many; and the way in which the government of the time failed to keep any documentation relating to those invited here - this is the material of farce.  It shows a deeply dysfunctional approach to the issue, but there’s also something more there.

During the tenure of Theresa May at the Home Office a policy was deliberately introduced of creating a “really hostile environment” for illegal immigrants, as she herself put it in 2012.  Of course, they will argue, this was aimed at ‘illegal’ immigrants rather than at those with a right to be here, but it also effectively placed the onus on anyone living in the UK to prove that they have a right to be here rather than on the authorities to prove that they do not.  It’s not quite a case of ‘guilty until proved innocent’, but it’s not far short of that (in another instance of those great British values being more about fine words than deeds). 

The implementation was then placed in the hands of officials who seem to have been told simply to implement the rules rather than question them or use any initiative, whilst ministers took a hands-off approach and let them get on with it.  It is that combination which led to a situation where officials were unsympathetic, rule-driven and inflexible; deporting – or attempting to deport – anyone who couldn’t produce the required reams of documentation, despite decades of contribution to the economy and society in which they lived.  The officials, of course, were ‘just following orders’.  Whilst that’s not a defence which they should be able to rely on – there should surely have been at least some of them understanding that what they were doing was wrong morally, as well as legally wrong in the case of those who had a right to be here but simply couldn’t prove it – the real target has to be those who gave the orders in the first place.  And guess who that brings us back to?

Yesterday’s apologies and U-turns are a welcome start, but unless they lead to a change, not only in the rules being applied, but also in the culture of those tasked with applying those rules, then the apology will be no more than a form of words, satisfying the news agenda of the day whilst leaving the basic processes in place.

Preventing that which never was

Tweet A report in the Western Mail last week talked about the need for schools to educate children to prevent them becoming “radicalised” and turning to “terrorism”.  It’s not the first report of this nature to leave me feeling more than a little uneasy; the BBC carried a report a month or so ago in which the Home Office claim to have “deradicalised” 500 people.

The first concern that this raises in my mind is partly related to a sloppy use of language.  Words like radicalised and terrorist are starting to lose any meaning as they are applied in increasingly general fashion – what’s wrong, exactly, with holding radical views for instance?  There’s a danger that we start to treat different views as always being unacceptable views.

The second concern is around the idea that either the government, or the school, can identify those at risk of developing into “radicals” with sufficient accuracy to be able to target individuals or groups and bring them back onto the path of righteousness.  It’s hard to see how any such approach can avoid the danger of branding particular demographic groups as potential radicals or terrorists.

And how do the Home Office known that they have deradicalised anyone?  Putting 500 people who might or might not have become terrorists through a targeted programme gives a measurable outcome certainly; but the long-term effects of that program are surely open to question at the very least.  An ability to conceal their views and intentions is one of the key factors in the “success” (to misapply a word) of some terrorist activities.  I can’t believe that any techniques likely to have been used in the programme – or any program of which I can conceive in a democracy – would overcome that ability.

The intentions behind such programs and proposals are entirely worthy; we all want to think the government is doing all that it can to protect us, as well as protecting potential perpetrators from themselves and each other.

I can’t help feeling though that a line has been crossed when governments claim to be able to identify large numbers of potential terrorists before they’ve actually done anything; and the claim to have prevented people from becoming what they would probably never have become anyway is more than a little dubious.