GORDON Brown’s lies on immigration were exposed again yesterday after it emerged that frontline officers who have arrested 1,000 illegal immigrants in a year are to be axed.
Immigration chiefs had claimed that vital staff, with powers to arrest illegal immigrants working without permits, would not be affected in a devastating round of redundancies affecting up to a third of employees.
But yesterday, an immigration officer working for the UK Border Agency revealed that at least one of its teams, operating in the migrant- magnet Kent ports of Dover and Folkestone is to be axed.
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The whistleblower said the jobs would go in the next three months, adding: “It sent shock waves through the staff, especially the scale of the job losses.
“The Prime Minister talks about being tough on immigration and protecting the frontline. But Kent is the frontline and we are set to lose an arrest team. It’s sad because the Kent immigration team is highly effective and delivers great results, having removed 1,000 illegal workers in the past year.”
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said: “Can we believe anything Gordon Brown says any more? What he says in public and what he does in private are clearly two very different things. It’s a sham.”
UKIP Euro MP Nigel Farage said: “Weaselly, underhand and dishonest seems to be the basic approach of the Government to immigration – trumpeting how tough it is whilst hamstringing the very men and women paid to do the hard job of guarding our borders. UKIP would triple the staff of the Border Agency, not cut it.”
Reductions in immigration staff will also take place at the UK Border Agency offices in Croydon, Liverpool, Sheffield and London.
The border agency staff in Folkestone and Dover received an email informing them of the job cuts last month. It read: “There will be a discrepancy of 15 staff between what we have on the books and what we can afford.”
Article Published
Friday April 23,2010
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