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item0049D 796, 797 25 August 2003Pantomime Brazil
Some 72 Brazilian musicians and supporters last week arrived at Heathrow Airport, invited to play at Liverpool's Mathews Street Festival, in honour of the Beatles. They were interrogated by Immigration officials, and six were refused entry. But what a pantomine! Such parties are normally nodded through, on the footing that they are taken to be "visitors". Some 27,000,000 visitors enter the UK each year, and our economy is heavily dependent on a strong flow of visitors - whether simply tourists or those with other specific purposes, like playing at a Beatles' festival. This 72-strong Brazilian party included both Band musicians and their friends and families, coming along for the trip. Nothing odd about that, you may think.But Immigration officials at Heathrow smelt a rat. They suspected illegal immigration. They interrogated the whole party for two hours, to determine whether or not they were bona fide visitors. And six of the younger supporters did not pass the test. They could not sing any Beatles songs - they thought Ringo Starr was dead - they did not know who Yoko Ono was! What a hoot! But it was not so funny for them: when 66 of the party were admitted, those six were sent back to Brazil - their holiday expensively ruined. Now - just consider that that means. In legal terms, every "newly arrived visitor" is deemed to be of illegal status, when descending from the plane. If the newcomer is "recognised" by the Immigration officials as a visitor, his passport is stamped and he is waved through - I understand that limited questions are often asked, about accommodation arrangements, return tickets, UK family links - but in most cases, the bona fides of the visitor is quickly established, and the luggage collected. The stamp in the passport converts illegal status into legal status, for the duration of the stay. In this case, the Brazilians did not pass this test. Six of them failed to convince the officials that they were genuine visitors. A similar "mass expulsion" took place four years ago, when a party of 35 Caribbean visitors, arriving at Heathrow for a family wedding in London, were all sent back on the next plane - simply because the officials did not believe their "story". The sheer informality of this process, while commercially understandable (getting into Russia is still a bureaucratic nightmare, gravely inhibiting tourism...), poses radical questions for international migration management as a whole.
I see huge systemic and legal difficulties, highlighted by this Brazilian case. These are the matters to which my Labour Government should be giving its most urgent attention - not the symbolic ill-treatment of "asylum-seekers"...
25 August 2003
No sooner than I had penned my surveillance principles than this challenging report appeared in The Guardian. Right here in Swansea, random Police surveillance identified a nasty case of child neglect, which really put me on the spot.Because the use of surveillance cameras in this case would not have complied with my principles. A Swansea couple were spotted, by a browsing CCTV operator on an afternoon in July, taking their baby on a pub-crawl. It was clear that they were both "under the influence", and the police patrol was alerted. They discovered various stolen goods hidden in the push-chair, the fruits of shop-lifting by both parents. And within the month, the local Magistrates Court dealt with their case. On the face of it, this supports the argument for open-ended surveillance - perpetual eye-in-the-sky surveillance - precisely the kind of random surveillance which I find unacceptable, and which must be horrendously expensive! Yet a hawk-eyed operator swoops to protect the baby, by timely intervention - 
Was this really a random intervention? The PA Report records that the 30-year-old husband was also convicted of driving while disqualified (though not on the same day) and was also "sentenced" to a drug-treatment programme. There were therefore two other reasons for the Police to "track" this man... Was the baby really in danger, from its drunken parents? Or was it merely a convenient excuse, to pick up the couple for other reasons? The pub-crawl incident itself was dealt with by a one-year community rehabilitation order.
I hold to my principles, in spite of the evidence of this case. Both Police practices (random electronic browsing, and electronic suspect-tracking) need careful consideration - and the Police must be given effective rules of engagement for their deployment. These are not matters of internal Police management - they ought to be of concern to all of us. What do you think? Drop me a line
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