System? What system?

The foreign prisoners scandal has revealed nothing less than a crisis of governance: the fundamental incapacity of what ministers feebly call ‘the system’ to respond to a series of urgent contemporary problems. This is a modern disaster in the making. It requires modern solutions.

On the BBC’s Ten O’Clock News last Monday, the first three items concerned immigration and population mobility: the prisoners scandal, the immigrant protest in the United States and the migration of workers around the expanded European Union. The movement of people around the world — legal and illegal — is now prodigious and in many respects to be welcomed as an engine of economic growth. But national governments and international structures are failing to keep pace with the implacable forces of globalisation.

Tony Blair came to power promising to be ‘tough on crime’. Yet after nine years of New Labour government, violent offences continue to rise (a further increase was recorded for October–December 2005); the consequences of European human rights legislation and other international conventions grow ever more vexatious and the mismanagement of the asylum system, immigration service and deportations remains deplorable.