Dual national threatened with deportation
The latest twist in the sorry tale of the UK government's media-dictated crackdown on "foreign criminals" involves a British-Pakistani dual national, who did time for what his sister describes (in Socialist Worker, so far the only newspaper to report this) as "minor offences", being served by a court with a deportation order and taken to Harmondsworth detention centre:
LENIN'S TOMB: The wrong kind of British
There is a telling paragraph, however, which suggests that the order is a mistake:
They gave him a document saying that they want to deport him to Pakistan because he has no ties in Britain and he has a criminal record.
Later on, the sister informs us that their "grandfather was invited to live here after he fought for the British in the Second World War", which hardly constitutes "no ties". My suspicion is that, contrary to the suggestion by the author of the Lenin's Tomb post that "someone noticed that Saqib had dual nationality", that nobody in fact noticed this and that the order will be overturned as soon as the mistake is noticed.
Nobody should underestimate the callousness and incompetence of this government, however; there is currently a Chilean named Ernesto Leal fighting expulsion, having lived here for nearly 30 years having fled the Pinochet dictatorship (see this comment I made on another blog). Mr Leal served 18 months of a sentence of three and a half years for injuring someone in a pub fight. Apart from the fact that this sort of offence is not the sort of thing that merits expulsion from a country where one has lived for nearly thirty years, these idiots first tried to deport him to Jamaica, to which he has no connection whatsoever. Before long one might expect anyone with a foreign sounding name, never mind a foreign passport, to be in danger of deportation.
(Osama Saeed has two posts [1], [2] about this issue; Brett at Harry's Place notes the tiny recidivism rate of these foreign convicts – 2% of those released since 1999. He cites this Times report, according to which more than 60% of "young male thugs and muggers" reoffend within two years.)
