Charge of Scotland's touchy-feely brigade is a ludicrous spectacle
The breast-beating over the removal of a family refused asylum is a depressing example of the political classes avoiding hard questions
By Angus Macleod
The Times
18 October 2005, p.8.
Original here

There is nothing so depressing and ludicrous as the political classes in Scotland indulging in one of their periodic bouts of misplaced sentimentality. The latest example, accompanied as usual by opportunistic breast-beating and some shoddy emotional journalism, is the furore over the forced removal from their home in Glasgow of the Vucaj family for deportation back to Albania.

The family, who, by all accounts, had settled in the community, were removed shortly after dawn by immigration officials who have subsequently been accused of heavy-handedness verging on the brutal, although with only anecdotal and one-sided evidence.

Cue a host of politicians ranging from an Executive minister (Malcolm Chisholm, whose capacity for left-wing grandstanding is apparently undiminished by office) to opposition politicians keen to use the Vucaj family as a reason for Holyrood to have more powers over immigration and asylum. Add in a familiar busybody in the shape of Kathleen Marshall, the Children's Commissioner, who never lets a fact get in the way of a television appearance, and what you have is the charge of the touchy-feely brigade, trying to make anyone who disagrees feel morally disreputable.

They have been given publicity by some journalists who refuse to ask difficult questions. The result is a recipe for that special Scottish talent of ignoring the facts in the hope that they will go away.

No one is arguing that children should be taken from their beds at some unholy hour on a regular basis to be deported on some official's whim. But whoever is to blame for what happened to the Vucaj youngsters, it is most certainly not the Home Office officials who carried out the raid, nor the ministers who are in charge of implementing the asylum and immigration policies of the United Kingdom.

We are being asked to believe by the army of breast-beaters that when an application for asylum is refused those concerned should simply be allowed to remain in this country on the grounds that a) their children have settled in a local school or b) the parents may at some point in the future contribute to the economy.

If that is to be the test, then surely it would be better to have no asylum rules at all. The key tactic for those fighting deportation would simply be to use all legal means to fight their expulsion until they could reach a point where the children would have been at a local school for two or three years and then turn round and say: "It's too late. Our children have made friends and cannot be taken away from them."

This is the kind of logic that Patrick Harvie, a Green MSP, and Stewart Stevenson, a Nationalist MSP, are asking us to embrace. Where would they draw the line? When would Scotland be judged too full?

One little but vital fact about the Vucaj family has gone virtually unmentioned. Many families refused asylum for perfectly good reasons depart these shores of their own free will. The Vucaj parents were told three years ago that their claim for asylum was to be refused and that they had no grounds to stay here as refugees. They refused to leave and fought their removal by all means open to them -- ensuring that at some point or other the immigration system would be forced to remove them by the only means available.

Whose fault was this? Did no one advising the Vucaj parents tell them they were placing their family at risk of the kind of forced deportation which eventually occurred? If they were so advised, why did they not listen? Those intent on allotting blame have absolved the parents of all culpability because to blame them would not fit in with their real game.

Which brings us to the "dawn raids". Would the touchy-feely brigade prefer that raids were conducted at 11am or 5pm? If so, could they please ensure that all members of a family were gathered in one place. Or is the real cause of their angst that those carrying out the "dawn raid" do not ask the family nicely enough if they wouldn't mind leaving?

What if the family said "No, we're perfectly happy here"? Should immigration officials shrug their shoulders and say "Well, that's all right then"? What if the request to leave was met with violence? Should the officials simply come unprepared for such a turn of events? These questions have not been put to Messrs Harvie, Stevenson, Marshall and Chisholm.

There is an attempt to use the example of the Vucaj family to portray Scotland as a moral exemplar to other parts of the UK. That is the subtext of the politicians and others who are so interested in the Vucajs that they have apparently forgotten to even establish why exactly they were refused entry to Britain in the first place.

Apparently, that does not matter. What matters is that the Government in London is portrayed as a morally bankrupt group of men and women who visit violence and retribution on innocent people in Scotland because they are foreigners. It wouldn't, of course, happen in self-righteous Scotland if Holyrood had more powers. Such propaganda is a disgrace.

Those who purport to represent the Vucajs should not misuse them in such a squalid way for a political purpose which has nothing to do with them. And it is to be regretted that Jack McConnell, the First Minister, has failed to correct that propaganda by asking the family's "supporters" the hard questions that might expose their shoddy game for what it is.

Instead Mr McConnell and his ministerial colleagues have bowed and scraped in the face of this politically correct army, searching for a "protocol" with the Home Office to make them appear on the side of the so-called angels. If Mr McConnell soon finds himself tarnished with the same brush as those who have simply sought to carry out the law, then he can hardly complain.