Dogwash

Julia brings us word of the downfall of one Benjamin Orororo, an employee of the UK Border Agency at the world-famous Lunatic House. A quick Google lends weight to my immediate suspicion that Our Benny is of the Nigerian persuasion.

A creatively entrepreneurial race, your Nigerians, and Benny's contribution was in using his position to facilitate the stay of prospective settlers, or asylum seekers as they are known in the trade, whose rampant porkies had been unaccountably rejected by the Home Office. For this he charged a modest handling fee, simply to cover his costs, you understand.

Well, dog bites man!

James Thurber's memoir of his time as a code clerk in the US diplomatic service comes to mind. He was posted, I think, to Paris where he was responsible for encrypting and decrypting the diplomatic cables which passed between the Paris Embassy and the State Department via the public telegram service.

Thurber was of course security-vetted before taking up such a sensitive post. This consisted of a friendly chat with a Government agent to whom Thurber was able to confirm that both his parents and all of his grandparents had been born in the United States. That was it, the total extent of the security check: how deep did Thurber's roots in the USA go?

There is a lesson to be learned there. UKBA has serious form for employing people whose loyalty to this country and its interests is at least unproven and frequently questionable. Whether they employ such folk for diversity-quota reasons or, perhaps more defensibly because of their specialist knowledge, or indeed because no sensible indigene is willing to work in Croydon*, I don't know. But as repeated experience has shown, it's not only a dangerous practice in principle, but a total failure in practice. In their eagerness and incompetence, UKBA has even employed illegal immigrants as immigration officers.

I don't know what Mr Orororo's status is, but clearly his roots in the UK do not go deep enough to amount to cultural and "tribal" assimilation to the extent that his loyalties are reliably to our communal interests.

This is part of what I was trying to get at in my earlier post about British identity.

Why are we employing people like Mr Orororo in a job where his loyalty to British interests, such as it may be, is in potential conflict with his tribal loyalty to people from his homeland or his projected "tribal" loyalty to immigrants in general? Why are we employing someone in a role like this where his cultural background is not exactly up to basic North European standards of probity — or to put it less pompously, from somewhere where backhanders are the norm?

To be honest I am wary of employing unassimilated tribals in the police and the armed forces just because they've wangled themselves a British passport. But in the immigration service — madness on stilts.

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* When my then employer, Megacorp Inc, was looking to reduce its office footprint in central London, as firms do from time to time when some bright spark compares office rentals without taking the whole picture into consideration, it offered one of my colleagues the opportunity to relocate to its Croydon office. This chap lived in one of the remaining non-feral areas of South London and in theory his commute would have been much easier. He refused point blank.