by Gawain Towler, spiked
The small-boats crisis has been enabled by bent lawyers, credulous judges and duplicitous NGOs.
The BBC has done the country a genuine service – no laughing at the back. On the front page of the BBC News website today is an investigation into immigration lawyers, who were found to be coaching fraudulent asylum claims, fabricating backstories, inventing persecution, selling identities wholesale to anyone who can pay. This is important journalism, and the team responsible deserves credit for it. Real, old-fashioned, get-your-hands-dirty investigative reporting, of the kind that used to be the BBC’s reason for existing. Congratulations, sincerely, to everyone involved.
Now, can we have a moment of honesty about what this ‘revelation’ actually reveals? Nothing. Nothing whatsoever that anyone paying attention did not already know. This has been going on for decades. Decades during which successive home secretaries of both parties stood at despatch boxes and talked about the integrity of the system, the rigour of the process, the robust safeguards in place, while the asylum industry quietly got on with its work, billing by the hour, gaming by the year, and laughing all the way to the legal aid pot.
The Daily Mail did an undercover investigation in 2023 that was near-identical in its findings. Reporters posing as economic migrants were offered elaborate fabricated backstories – featuring sexual torture, political persecution, support for Khalistani independence – for between £4,000 and £10,000 a time, complete with coached testimony and forged supporting evidence. The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) intervened in three firms within days of publication. Three. Out of how many? The warning notice the SRA issued afterwards conceded that wrongdoing might be ‘more widespread than simply a handful of firms’. Might be. A remarkable understatement for a system operating at industrial scale.