Andrew Tettenborn
The Home Office’s pamphlet for asylum seekers published last Wednesday rightly attracted derision. It amounted to a rather pointless reminder of the bleeding obvious: that sex equality mattered in Britain, and that if while here you committed rape, had underage sex, or bullied your family, you could go to prison and might prejudice your chance of getting asylum.
Social media had a predictable field day. Spoof government pamphlets popped up everywhere reminding people that we had funny little rules against cannibalism, grooming little girls, stabbing and beheading people, and waging jihad.
One might have thought this was the cue to forget this Home Office sodden squib and move on. But no. Andy Burnham and Lucy Powell earnestly doubled down on the need for the exercise. And then Mike Tapp, ex-migration minister under Keir Starmer (who a year ago was busy puffing the one-in-one-out policy as a decisive turning point in immigration control), weighed in with what looked like an even more curious proposal. He said that we should be going further and ‘testing whether people coming here understand these laws’, on the basis that ‘if they do not, then they should not be able to claim asylum here’.
