A Taste of Things to Come

The Ministry of Unfitness for Purpose has kindly provided a foretaste of life in a Britain where citizens' rights will depend on the whims and megrims of the national database system. Sabbir Ahmed, who was born in Blackburn of British Indian parents, was assumed to be Pakistani and held for deportation after serving two months for driving while disqualified. He was detained in Hampshire, which presumably accounts for the fact that his Lancashire accent was taken as an indication of foreign birth; and was unable to supply proof of nationality on demand because he had failed to take his passport into custody with him.

A spokesbeing for the Ministry of Unfitness for Purpose acknowledged that cases like Ahmed's have "been a problem in the past" (Ahmed was released in September, having served two months for driving while disqualified plus forty-eight days on suspicion of inadequate Britishness levels) and that "an individual will be given ample opportunity to demonstrate their entitlement to remain", provided they can demonstrate it without leaving the detention centre to which they have been spirited, perhaps before dawn and at the behest of a computer run by the IT trade's equivalent of Network Rail. "Yes, sir, of course you may go free, you and your family - just as soon as you've demonstrated your entitlement to remain given that your identity card corresponds to that of three separate Middle Eastern terrorists and that of your six-month-old daughter in the next cell-block to a drug lord from Uzbekistan ... Computer error? Come off it sir, we're not all incompetents in this country you know..."

The spokesbeing also noted that "resources dedicated to dealing with foreign national prisoners had 'more than doubled' since last April"; which, given the Ministry's record in such matters, presumably means that there is now more than twice the chance of this kind of thing occurring again. The spokesbeing also said that "new guidance had been issued to prison officers", and (my favourite) that "specialist teams had been set up in prisons to help identify foreign nationals". It is to be hoped that the teams of Britishness specialists patrolling our centres of miscreant redemption can tell a foreign accent from a regional one; but even if they can, the years of intensive training required to distinguish, say, a Yorkshireman from a North Korean may prove too expensive for the Ministry of Unfitness for Purpose to provide. When that point arrives, staff will be forced to rely entirely on the database and on their own judgement - the kind of judgement which recently identified five British children as foreign, apparently on the grounds that they were black and in prison.

At the moment, it is just about possible to avoid deportation by the eternally prudent expedient of being Caucasian; but one day even this may not be enough. When it comes to a choice between the evidence of their own eyes and the readout from a National Identity Database, it seems doubtful that staff at the Ministry of Unfitness for Purpose will be inclined to rely upon their fallible, fleshly, non-privatised organs of opticality.