Thursday, July 26, 2007

Brown trying to look tough on terror



Gordon Brown is showing no signs of backing away from his predecessor's predisposition to do things that made look superficially tough on terror. He's pushing his demands to extend detention without charge period beyond the already very long 28 days and now he's keen to deploy a border force (originally a Conservative party plan) to look tough on immigration. They're all going to get uniforms you know.

In only November last year Immigration minister Liam Byrne was ridiculing the border force plan:

"The chaos of a damaging, distracting and disruptive reorganisation of three agencies on the front line into a single border force. That idea is outdated and is rooted in a concept of a frontier that is long past.

It is simplistic and dangerous in the disruption that it poses. The number of people who seek to come to this country might double in the next 10 to 15 years, and I simply cannot think of a worse use of time than to consume front-line staff in the process of reapplying for their own jobs in a reorganisation, the benefits of which we are already achieving by equipping different agencies with the powers to do each other's jobs"

I guess he didn't realise his soon to be leader liked the idea.

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