The Home Office has finally confessed that there had been an error that allowed an adult Iranian male illegal immigrant to be enrolled in an Ipswich secondary school. The incident, which disturbed both parents and children as Stoke school and caused some families to withdraw their children from the school, came to light when social media pictures of the adult man, who is in his thirties, in a school classroom emerged.
According to a report a few days ago in the Daily Mail the Home Office is to carry out an internal investigation how an adult illegal migrant who was at least thirty years old, managed to pose as a 15 year old and pass immigration age checks. It will be interesting to see what this investigation turns up or if the results of it are ever released to the public. I suspect that what it may uncover is a staff culture where employees fear the wrath of well organised migrant advocacy groups from outside the department and senior management and maybe ministers who are virtue signalling from the inside. This fear of the virtue signallers within and the shroud-waving screamers without, may cause some Home Office staff to pass as children those migrants who are plainly not under 18. It’s probably considerably easier and less aggravation for a junior or middle ranking civil servant in the Home Office to tick the box marked ‘child’, even when they may have personal doubts about the migrant’s age status, it is certainly going to be less career damaging to do that than to stick one’s neck out.
It may merely be that this case is one that centres on a particular employee who was lazy, lackadaisical or covering their arse, but I suspect that this may be the tip of the iceberg and that there may be other similar cases like the Ipswich one that have not yet been uncovered. If there is a workplace cultural problem in the Home Office with people taking the path of least resistance rather than exercising proper judgement, then we can probably expect there to be other areas and other schools that have had adult men posing as children dumped on them. I fear that the Ipswich case is merely the opening movement of a much bigger scandal.
There appears to be a whole host of failures in this case and not just failures by the Home Office. Blame for this disgraceful incident needs to be apportioned elsewhere as well.
The school failed to spot that this man was not a child and allegedly tried to silence parents who complained by threatening legal action against the parents for ‘bullying’. This alleged behaviour suggests that the school management may have had as their primary concern not the safeguarding of the children in the school, but instead their priority may have been protecting the school’s reputation. The obvious attempt by the school to shut down public concern about the presence of a man in the school also suggests that the school may have suspected an age anomaly but enrolled him because the Home Office paperwork looked OK. If that is the case then this is a monstrous failure of safeguarding procedures and an indication that the school may have put reputation management and covering up for the schools incompetence ahead of protecting the children in the school.
We should not also discount the possibility that one of more of the school’s senior management team may have been sympathetic to the ‘refugees welcome’ movement and therefore the admission of this fake child may have been in part facilitated by ideological bias. With many teachers in Britain leaning to the Left politically and with Ipswich having an active and apparently politically influential pro migrant ‘Town of Sanctuary’ group, this scenario is sadly not too far fetched. As a parent who is currently searching for a suitable school for my child I am increasingly shocked and angered at some of the lefty guff that is being promoted in schools. It is not completely inconceivable that the Town of Sanctuary group has affected the political culture in Ipswich making it much more likely that situations like the one at Stoke school could occur.
Ipswich Town of Sanctuary is part of the City of Sanctuary group, a bunch of ‘refugees welcome’ obsessives that I have written about before on here, due to their naivety about the ‘refugees’ that this bunch of middle class leftists are expecting the rest of us to welcome. City of Sanctuary have, in some places such as Nottingham, but not in Ipswich, links with and support from the pro-Islam and pro-migrant community umbrella organisation Citizens UK. However both Citizens UK and City of Sanctuary both share many common aims centred around opening the country’s borders to these potentially dangerous ‘refugees’. I would not at all be surprised if there were contacts between Ipswich Town of Sanctuary and elements from Citizens UK encouraging. At the very least Ipswich Town of Sanctuary is singing from the same hymn sheet as Citizens UK.
I must admit that if I was an Ipswich resident any potential influence by the Citizens UK would worry me. Citizens UK are, for those who unaware, a powerful, well funded and well connected consortium of communal, political and left wing religious groups that have good connections within the political and administrative Establishment and are very well versed influence peddlers.
Some of the political influence that Citizens UK have had has been in relatively benign areas such as campaigns for the so called ‘Living Wage’, but much of their campaigning has a pro-Islam, pro-migrant and pro-refugee flavour. Citizens UK has gained considerable influence over such entities as churches, synagogues, charities and community organisations and exploits these entities to agitate for pro-refugee policies. Citizens UK was a major influence over the growth of the entire ‘refugees welcome’ movement in the United Kingdom as well as being the major push behind the Dubs Amendment that was, in its turn, the cause of the big fake ‘adult children’ scandal a few years back. They are, as I have stated before, a thoroughly anti-British organisation .
The pro-refugee statements made by the Ipswich Town of Sanctuary organisation are very similar to those I’ve seen coming from chapters of Citizens UK such as Nottingham Citizens. This from the Ipswich Town of Sanctuary website is very similar in its aims to those expressed by Nottingham Citizens are building links with the Sanctuary Network.
In October 2012, Ipswich Borough Council passed a resolution of support towards Ipswich becoming a Town of Sanctuary:
IBC resolves to declare that Ipswich will serve as a “Town of Sanctuary” for genuine asylum seekers and refugees (sanctuary seekers) that are forced to flee from their own countries to avoid persecution or danger. To that end IBC will within current resources:-
• Seek to be a welcoming town for refugees and those seeking sanctuary
• Co-operate with Ipswich Town of Sanctuary movement to help develop policies and strategies with the community and organisations of Ipswich to support sanctuary seekers
• Work with its staff to ensure that they understand the needs of those seeking sanctuary and are able to challenge misinformation in the wider community
• Look to promote ways of valuing sanctuary seekers through the offering of volunteer opportunities both in the wider Ipswich community and where possible within IBC
It looks to me as if Ipswich Town of Sanctuary and similar groups operating in the town may have the sort of considerable political influence it takes to get a council to pass a motion like this. Although Ipswich Borough Council is a majority Labour council, it still takes a lot of effort to get councillors to pass a resolution like this. As you may have noticed the council is going to work with the Ipswich Town of Sanctuary group in order to dump ‘refugees’ on Ipswich. I also suspect that Ipswich Town of Sanctuary will also be involved in any pro-refugee propaganda efforts aimed at council staff and the wider public that is put out.
The political class in Ipswich has obviously bought into the ‘refugees welcome’ guff and have, by bringing groups like Ipswich Town of Sanctuary onboard, created a culture where it career damaging for a teacher or council employee to say ‘this person is not a child’ even if they were minded to do so. In Ipswich it seems that we have a toxic cocktail of pro-migrant groups, some sharing aims with other bigger and more challenging groups, having influence over council policy which includes education. Couple this with the leftist bias in Britain’s education system and it is easy to see how a local culture of ‘say nothing, just enrol the ‘child’’ could emerge.
This sort of culture with excessive influence of leftist and communal groups worries me and suggests that there may be far more wrong with Ipswich’s education system than just this one fake child. From what I can gather about this story, the parents who have complained about the man in the classroom have been faced with what can only be described as an attitude of extreme arrogance by the political class, council staff and school staff. Their concerns about safeguarding and security have been completely dismissed and there have been allegations that parents were bullied into silence. The behaviour by those in authority towards those who have complained looks worryingly similar to how those councils, often Labour ones, that for political and ideological reasons, covered up Islamic Rape Gang crimes. When I see this attitude from the political and educational provision classes in Ipswich it does make me wonder just how many other adult children have passed through the schools of the town? It was only because a public fuss was created by justifiably angry parents that this matter came to light in the first place, but there may have been other occasions when sufficient fuss has not been made, where the dangerous practise of putting fake kids in with real kids has occurred or is occurring. Because of the influence of pro-migrant groups on the local authority and by extension the local educational establishment, it is quite possible that many more fake children will have been placed in Ipswich’s schools.
There is a lot of blame to apportion with this incident. Blame should not fall solely on the Home Office, even though I believe that a sufficiently senior level of head should roll over how the part of the Home Office that passed this adult illegal as a child, has been managed. We also need to direct much of the blame and therefore much of our anger at this situation at the pro-migrant, pro-refugee sympathies and culture of the local authority including both councillors and council officers. Also at fault here as is the influence of so-called ‘Sanctuary’ groups both local and national. These ‘refugee’ obsessives often care little for those Britons who suffer the depredation caused by these groups ‘refugee’ pets. It was refugees welcome groups connected to both City of Sanctuary and Citizens UK that brought in the Islamic savage and pretend child who was involved with attempt to murder a great many Londoner’s in the Parson’s Green bomb attack To blame also is an educational system that is so politically bent and blinkered that they refused to believe the evidence of their own eyes and treated a grown man as a child. Surely the headteacher at least should have had the gumption to compare the reality of who stood in front of her and the unreality of Home Office’s classification of this illegal as a ‘child’ and speak up? Obviously not it seems, at least that is the case in Ipswich.
The more I look at the original Ipswich man in a classroom case and the background to it the more it becomes apparent that it did not I believe happen in isolation. The local political culture, the generally leftist education sector, and the influence of pro-migrant NGO’s are all factors to how this appalling incident could have come about. There is not just one site of blame for this incident, there are many of them, some like the Home Office national ones and some, like the Labour council, the school and the NGO’s much more local. To stop these situations happening in the future there needs to be, at both local and national level, politicians who will not prioritise often dangerous, disruptive and expensive to support ‘refugees’ over the security and well-being of the rest of us.
