The System Is Broken

Nothing works in Britain anymore. It's tempting to blame the government's undeniable incompetence - but the government is just the rotten cherry on top of a rancid sundae.

This week I learned, to my deep and profound disgust, about a foreign criminal called Clirim Kukaj. Kukaj was born and brought up in Serbia, but he’s an ethnic Albanian. In 2007, aged 13, he entered the UK illegally and was caught; his asylum claim was refused, but for unknown reasons he was given leave to remain here until June 2010. Unfortunately he didn’t leave in June 2010, as he was supposed to, but in 2014 - again for unknown reasons - he was given indefinite leave to remain.

It’s pretty awful, isn’t it? A foreigner who has no right to be here entered the country illegally, was given permission to remain for three years, stayed for seven years and was then allowed to stay here permanently. This, to me, says that something is horribly wrong with our immigration system. People who enter this country illegally should not be allowed to stay here. People who are given permission to stay in this country for a limited amount of time, but are still here four years after they were supposed to leave, should not be allowed to stay here. Especially when they’re criminals.

And no, before anyone tries to tell me that entering the UK illegally isn’t a crime (you’re wrong; it is) that’s not what I’m talking about. In June 2020 he and another Albanian were arrested during a police raid on a cannabis farm, which netted 580 plants worth around half a million pounds. Kukaj claimed he didn’t own the plants and was just being paid to look after them, and managed to get away with an 18-month prison sentence.

Crime does have consequences, though, and Home Secretary Priti Patel decided the country would be better off without this particular Albanian criminal in it. Three months into Kukaj’s imprisonment she informed him that when he was released he would also be deported. At this point the human rights industry swung into action; Kukaj’s lawyers claimed deporting him would violate his human rights. The Home Office rejected the claim but the lawyers successfully appealed. Kukaj was granted a hearing, and on 8 January he appeared before the Immigration and Asylum Chamber of the Upper Tribunal (UTIAC). There, Judge Fiona Lindsley ruled that deporting him back to Serbia would violate his human rights because - no, I am not making this up - he’s forgotten how to speak Serbian.

Now, I’m not going to claim to have mastered the terrifyingly complex Serbian language, but I do speak some. I have a Serbian vocabulary of maybe a hundred words and a few phrases of varying usefulness - “Dva piva, molim” (two beers, please) certainly got more use than “Stoj! SFOR! Stani ili putsam!” (Halt! SFOR! Stop or I fire!"). As you might guess from the second example I learned my little store of Serbian in Bosnia, in 1996 - and I haven’t forgotten it.

If I can still remember the Serbian I learned on a six-month operational tour 28 years ago, are we seriously expected to believe that a man who grew up in Serbia for 13 years, and since then has lived in the UK with his brother and sister-in law - both Serbian citizens - has forgotten it? Well, I don’t believe this for a moment.

What I do believe is that the British system - the Civil Service, government agencies, the NHS, the police and of course the court and tribunal system - is riddled with activists who use their positions to push their own agendas at every opportunity. For example Fiona Lindsley, the judge who accepted Kukaj’s ludicrous claim and ruled that he can stay in this country despite his blatant and long-running criminality, is a former immigration lawyer. She built her career on helping foreign criminals stay in this country, and along the way she’s cost British taxpayers a lot of money. For example, in 2001 she won £80,000 in compensation for an Albanian couple who were arrested at Heathrow in 1998 while en route from Albania to Canada. Passport checkers at Heathrow discovered they were travelling on false passports and, not unreasonably, turned them over to the police; they pleaded guilty and were jailed for six months. Lindsley argued that the 1951 refugee convention says asylum seekers shouldn’t be penalised for entering a country illegally. It does - but what it doesn’t say is that asylum seekers are allowed to travel on forged documents.

Lindsley clearly has an agenda - to let anyone who wants to stay in Britain remain here, even if they commit serious crimes. What possessed the Home Office to appoint a person like that to an immigration tribunal? It’s baffling - but the system is riddled with people like Lindsley. The day after she inflicted Kukaj on us for the rest of his worthless life, a lower immigration tribunal ruled that Gazmend Jaupaj should be allowed to remain in the UK too. Jaupaj is also Albanian. He also entered the UK illegally. He was also arrested in a raid on a cannabis farm and he was also scheduled for deportation, but appealed. This time the judge decided that it would be unfair to deport him because it was “unreasonable” to expect his wife - who’s an immigrant from the Philippines - to live in Albania. Obviously the judge didn’t feel it was unreasonable to expect us to tolerate an Albanian drug dealer in our midst, but then we’re just British people; we don’t matter, apparently.

At every level, the system that runs this country is full of people like these demented immigration judges. They’ve forgotten - if they ever knew - what their job is. Judges whose job is to enforce the law, but glory in helping people evade it. Policemen whose job is to prevent crime and catch criminals, who devote their time to pushing wokery instead. MPs whose job is to represent their constituents, but endlessly obsess over Gaza. Ministers whose job is to govern Britain, but who seem determined, despite Brexit, to let the EU do it for them.

As long as this country is governed and run by an out of touch elite who refuse to put Britain and the British people first, things are never going to improve. It doesn’t matter whether you vote Conservative or Labour, because on all the issues that count they’re exactly the same - big-state technocrats in thrall to supranational organisations like the EU, WHO and WEF. Whichever one is elected, Britain will stagger on down the path to technocratic multicultural Hell - unless we use the next general election to break the mould, and put both major parties on notice that we won’t stand for this madness anymore.