Rob's Blog

I’m watching a documentary on BBC1 about South Yorkshire Police. They have set up a road block and are pulling over Transit minibuses in search of illegal immigrants being ferried from Sheffield to surrounding farms where they work illegally. Well, we can’t have strawberry pickers roaming around the countryside un-checked now, can we? What a good thing South Yorkshire Police are protecting us!

One suspect is told, “if you’re claiming benefit you’re not allowed to work.” That should be, “if you’re working you’re not allowed to claim benefit”, surely?

Another cop picks up a couple of guys walking along the motorway. This is dangerous, the narrator explains and, more importantly, “illegal”. While sitting in the back of the police car, one of them lets slip that he’s from Uganda. The narrator continues, “but now that Brown has discovered they’re asylum seekers, he wants to find out if their IDs are in order.”

Traffic cops like PC Brown should be doing something more useful that worrying about people who come to the UK to pick strawberries or process poultry. Here we have the law getting in the way of policing.

Later Brown goes on to patrol the A616 where dangerous drivers are known to cross double white lines to overtake. This is far more useful, even if it would more properly be done privately and paid for by road owners and insurance companies!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 27th, 2004 at 9:15 pm and is filed under Civil Liberties. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.