A British man, 22 years old, born and raised in Shrewsbury who has never left the gilded coasts of this sceptred Isle, has been threatened by the Home Office with deportation to Uganda. The Home Office reckoned he has “no legal right” to be in the UK.
The ‘Hostile Environment’, the ultimate example of idiotic bureaucracy, of Ministerial allegiance to arbitrary authoritarianism: lazy, indiscriminate inhumanity, has germinated yet another foolish perversity.
Immigration officers called Kyle Herbert’s work – KFC – to inform his boss that Herbert was an illegal immigrant.
Often, out of barbarous circumstances and troublesome times, it is human nature simply to laugh. Often, when circumstances have spiraled into something so farcical in its impossibility, the whirlpool spits out some surreal absurdity that dashes the dark depths with a touch of colour and brings reality back into the fray.
Kyle was threatened with a £5,000 fine, imprisonment and removal by force. He was even suspended for a fortnight by his boss at KFC who, despite presumably talking to Kyle on a daily basis, was not able to discern Kyle’s non-Ugandan heritage.
As one would expect of the intentionally impenetrable, monolithic, grey machine of paper and files, the Home Office made it as hard as possible for Kyle to get through and talk to a real life human about the fact that he was from Shrewsbury and not Entebbe.
Even as Kyle was trying to contact the Home Office, they were sending final letters demanding he report to a deportation centre.
The arduous process may serve to show those that seek to denigrate and vilify immigrants that it is not only they who can be on the receiving end of the State’s brutal idiocy.
The Home Office, through vain pursuit of its ‘Hostile Environment’, are also now coming for British-born citizens.
Perhaps the incident will serve as a reminder that by targeting immigrants, and by wrongly subjecting them to imprisonment and deportation, the Home Office isn’t serving the country – its serving scapegoating tendencies and bureaucratic targets.
