Appetite for destruction

Have you ever thrown something away and then realised that you needed it? Surely all of us have done so. There is even a collective noun for such items in The Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd: ‘nottage.’

However, it is not just people who have nottage, but governments as well.

Last week, we learned how the Home Office in October 2010 had destroyed thousands of landing card slips recording the arrival by boat of immigrants into this country. These slips, stored in the basement of an anonymous tower block, had been particularly useful for Home Office caseworkers when seeking to prove how long somebody had been resident in the UK. With the passing of the 2014 Immigration Act, and with many elderly members of the Windrush generation seeking to resolve their immigration status under the now notorious ‘hostile environment’, the absence of these slips suddenly proved to be a handicap.