‘Individuals who seek to create fear, distrust and divisions in order to stir up terrorist activity will not be tolerated by the government or by our communities.’ So said Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, on Wednesday, when outlining the grounds on which undesirable foreigners can be deported or excluded from the UK.
But you don’t have to create fear and distrust to find yourself excluded. Being Australian will do. Earlier this month, an old schoolfriend of my wife’s was booted out of England for no reason that she — or we — could understand. Julie Hope, a 50-year-old divorcee and mother of three grown-up children, arrived to stay with us in London in March. She had given up her job as a garden designer so that she could take what she called a ‘late gap year’. She has many friends and relations in England and Europe. Her father is an influential New South Wales grazier, and her children were educated at Prince Charles’s old school, Geelong Grammar.
Last month Julie accompanied us on a holiday to France, but left before us to stay with cousins in Suffolk. We took her to Nice airport for the easyJet flight to Stansted. It was all very routine. What followed, however, was anything but routine.
About eight hours after her flight left, Julie rang me on my mobile to tell me she was being sent back to Nice on the next easyJet flight, and would we please pick her up at the airport? There was no time to ask her what had happened. Could it be that the immigration officers at Stansted, in their post-7 July zeal to protect our borders, had decided that Julie was somehow an undesirable alien? The idea was just too absurd … and then we heard Julie’s story.
As she came through the arrivals gate, eyes red and swollen, she was barely able to describe the horrors she had endured at the hands of Charles Clarke’s finest.
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