Operation Brace: How the Government Ordered Officials to Ignore Suspect Immigrant Applications
Operation Brace was the code name for a specific order to immigration officials to rush through 337,000 dodgy immigration applications without further checks, correspondence released by the Home Office has revealed.
Copies of notes written in 2003 between Sir Bill Jeffrey, who was the director-general of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, and Beverley Hughes, then minister of state for citizenship and immigration, have now been posted onto the Home Office website in response to a Freedom of Information request.
The correspondence reveals that the backlog of immigration applications had reached such proportions that the government ordered officials just to process them even if the documentation was incomplete or suspicious.
The memos start with one dated March 2003. Sir Jeffrey wrote a note to Mrs Hughes saying that “We are still in a situation where some risks have to be taken, and staff should feel that if they are encouraged to take risks they will be supported when something does go wrong.”
The answer he received, three days later, reads as follows: “Beverley Hughes has seen and noted your submission of 7 March . . . Beverley feels the basic point is that while staff have to take some risks, this was a decision that flew in the face of common sense.”
The e-mail was copied to David Blunkett, then home secretary, and Sir John Gieve. The words “to be withheld” were later handwritten across the top in what was clearly an attempt to keep the document from becoming public. It is not known whose handwriting it is.
A few days later, Sir Jeffrey replied to Mrs Hughes in another note which specified exactly what the “risk-taking” policy was.
The “Brace” policy entailed, Sir Jeffrey wrote, fast tracking all 337,000 outstanding immigration applications, “with little or no regard as to whether they were merited.”
“The policy means that officials have to make quick decisions based on the paperwork in an applicant’s file, regardless of whether it was complete. No further follow-up checks were to be made.”
He added that staff were given guidance that “Brace is about pragmatic (i.e. not pursing every angle that could conceivably justify refusal) grants rather than pragmatic refusals.”
In simple English, this means that it is official policy to accept all applications rather than go through the effort of refusing them.
Such refusal would invariably result in hundreds of thousands of appeals, which would clog up the system even further.
The practical effect of this policy was revealed in public in 2001 when more than 20 Taliban guerrillas, who had fled from Afghanistan after their defeat by American and British forces, were granted permission to stay in Britain.
The British National Party has the answer to the immigration “backlog” and the huge number of immigration applications.
The simple solution is to declare Britain full-up and a non-immigration country, just like China, India, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have done.
