Migrant crisis and the Home Office’s failings

Sir, I agree with Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, that the “shameful” high numbers of migrants arriving show that the government “must take more radical action” (“Small boat arrivals this year pass total for whole of 2024”, Oct 23). But Labour policies, the “one in, one out” scheme and “smashing the gangs”, are not working. It is time the party acknowledges the reasons why the UK is a magnet for people crossing by boats and tackle these. Placing people in four-star hotels, and offering them NHS facilities and a wide range of benefits, means our streets will continue to be seen to be paved in gold.
Alan Howes
Ambleside, Cumbria

Sir, I am frustrated and angry at the inability of successive governments to deal with the illegal immigrants arriving by boat on our shores. While I am compassionate about the plight of these people, there are legal options open to them and if they choose the illegal option of coming by boat then they are breaking the law and should be immediately returned to their points of origin. We in the UK are a soft touch and the government must be tougher in dealing with these migrants, and with the French who facilitate the traffic.
Neil Vokes
Wokingham

Sir, Apropos the Home Office document detailing the department’s failings (news, Oct 23 & 24), it is clear, and has been for some time, that the department should be split in two, with a separate immigration and border security department, leaving the Home Office to deal with the other manifold problems it faces.
Lord Horam
House of Lords

Sir, Should we be reassured that Home Office officials are bringing their “whole self to work” (“Home Office set up to fail, says Mahmood after secret report”, Oct 23), even if they are reluctant to cross the threshold?
Louise Buckley
Flixton, Greater Manchester

Budget jitters

Sir, The steady drip of so-called leaks from the Treasury and the chancellor’s office in the run-up to the budget does little to illuminate her economic philosophy. If anything, it exposes confusion, indecision and a striking absence of coherent policy. The mandarins appear to have forgotten that fiscal discipline begins with restraint, not spin. Their instinct that only the state can rescue the economy betrays both a lack of imagination and an unwillingness to trust the private sector to share the load. What passes for economic strategy looks less like stewardship and more like drift.
Nick Bunting
Brixworth, Northants

Sir, The government continually states that growth is a main objective. Why then are we waiting so long for the budget? Most of my clients want confidence to invest in capital projects, but they are holding back until the tax effects are known. Surely the decision on how to raise tax efficiently and fairly cannot take this long. Businesses need timely decisions to invest.
Martyn Pattie
Director, MP Chartered Architects; Ongar, Essex

Sir, If Johnny Cameron can’t conceive of a political leader who revived their nation’s economy with more spending and socialist policies (letter, Oct 22), he might perhaps begin by studying the achievements of Franklin D Roosevelt, who pumped billions of dollars into the US economy. A newly created Works Progress Administration eventually directly employed nearly nine million on new infrastructure projects. While we might today regard such measures as only mildly and to a limited degree “socialist”, FDR’s political enemies at the time had no doubt they were the first step towards outright communism.
Rob Maynard
Bristol

Casey conundrum

Sir, I admire and respect Baroness Casey of Blackstock, but following the prime minister’s announcement that she has been asked to help the grooming gangs inquiry (news, Oct 24), I am left wondering where this leaves the adult social care inquiry that she is leading and which is due to issue an initial report in 2026. I don’t want to suggest there is a hierarchy of need, as both issues are worthy recipients of careful consideration, but please let Baroness Casey focus on what she was asked to do, namely the adult social care review. Successive governments have made and broken promises and kicked adult social care into the long grass. This seems yet another delaying tactic.
Glenise Ensor
Lichfield

Defence cuts

Sir, The armed forces are being told to make economies after discovering a £2 billion budget shortfall (news, Oct 24). The British Army musters just 49 infantry battalions at present yet has over 100 brigadiers. If cuts have to be made, deflating the bloat of senior ranks would be a good start.
Robert Frazer
Salford

Joined-up justice

Sir, Your article “Justice system ‘in a state of collapse’ ” (news, Oct 23) correctly identifies the severity of the crisis. The core problem is that we do not have a joined-up criminal justice system. Policing, courts, prisons and probation operate in silos, with separate funding streams and disconnected strategies. Each component responds to immediate pressures without considering the impact on the entire landscape. Until government adopts genuinely integrated and radical thinking — treating criminal justice as a single, interconnected system requiring co-ordinated investment and reform — we will continue lurching from crisis to crisis. Piecemeal solutions cannot fix systemic failure. I recognise the government has made concerted efforts to reform the justice system, including the Leveson and Gauke reviews, and I urge it to continue its vital mission and enact long-lasting and fundamental change benefiting victims and our communities.
Anthony Rogers
Chief inspector, HM Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate

Rising up the ranks

Sir, You report that a commission will review the way in which senior police officers are recruited, trained and promoted (news, Oct 23). It is long overdue. In the past 20 years or so, there has been a steady erosion of these vital elements. Diminished attention to a search for high-calibre recruits; the closure of the Staff College; in-force rather than national or international training programmes — these and much more have reduced the ability of the service to play its pivotal role in society. The old truism that “managers are important, leaders are essential” has been turned on its head. The results are obvious.

The commission will have a chance to set a new course for the police service. It will require a bold and unfettered approach. Let us all hope that the long grass will not be where the report finally resides.
Lord Dear
HM Inspector of Constabulary (1990-97); chief constable, West Midlands police (1985-90)

Big tech’s free rein

Sir, Hugo Rifkind is right to trace today’s free speech crisis to the abdication of responsibility by the digital platforms that dominate our public sphere (comment, Oct 23). For two decades, social media companies have insisted they are not publishers while exercising extraordinary editorial control. They decide what trends, what vanishes, and what outrages travel furthest. This isn’t free speech; it’s free reach. And it comes without accountability. Any platform that curates, ranks, or amplifies content performs the same function as an editor. If we want to protect genuine freedom of expression while reducing online harm, we must finally recognise them as publishers under law. Otherwise, the “Wild West” Mr Rifkind describes will keep claiming victims — truth among them.
Ross Burley
Co-founder, Centre for Information Resilience

Hirsute tradition

Sir, John Henderson suggests judges and barristers should stop wearing wigs, “which provoke ridicule rather than respect” (letter, Oct 24). In the Crown Court Study I conducted as a member of the royal commission on criminal justice (1991-93), we administered questionnaires to all the participants in every completed case over a two-week period in every crown court in England and Wales, apart from three courts used in the pilot. One of the 81 questions was whether barristers and judges should wear wigs and gowns. The 5,538 jurors who answered that question overwhelmingly supported tradition: 78 per cent thought barristers and 88 per cent thought judges should wear wigs. Young jurors were as much of that opinion as older jurors.
Michael Zander KC
Emeritus professor, London School of Economics

Sir, I have always understood that wigs afforded barristers and judges a degree of anonymity outside court. If they don’t like wearing wigs, may I suggest they adopt more modern standards of dress to attain the same end: baseball caps, sunglasses and hoodies would do the job.
Nicholas Allen
Ipswich

School delicacies

Sir, Further to your correspondence on school dinner concoctions (letters, Oct 22 & 23), I’ve always wondered what my children ate at their primary in the 1990s; when asked what they’d had, they often replied: “Flat meat.”
Sophy McIntosh
Watchet, Somerset

Sir, At my boarding school in the 1960s a popular dessert was a large, thick rectangle of shortbread sitting in a pool of chocolate custard. It was known as “Thames mud and barges”.
Angie Waddell
Pinner, Middx

Straight in the bin

Sir, I was astonished to learn that smart glasses will help delivery drivers “identify packages and drive to the correct destination” (“Amazon plugs in new breed of robots”, business, Oct 24). No doubt the software is pre-loaded with “wheelie bin” as the default setting.
David Nicolson
Boxgrove, W Sussex

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