News

The Prosser Perspective.... a weekly column from Dover and Deal MP Gwyn Prosser

3 July 2008

Last week I joined up with local support groups and entertainers in the town square to attend Dover ’s 10th annual Multi Cultural Festival which I’ve had the pleasure of officially opening for the last 10 years.

It was another enjoyable event and the only police presence was a patrol car and two young PCSO’s who were there to chat with local people and enjoy the occasion which is as it should be. But it wasn’t always like that.

The first of the festivals took place during Dover’s difficult days when illegal immigration was at its height and large numbers of people were coming across the Channel and claiming asylum. The border controls in Calais and Dover could not cope and the authorities had no powers to move people on to places with more appropriate accommodation and better support facilities.

The high concentration of immigrants in one area of the town gave rise to serious social tensions and the risk of hostility was such that the police were reluctant to give permission for that first local Multi Cultural Festival.

There have been major improvements in the policing of our borders since those difficult days. We negotiated the closure of the Sangatte Centre in France , we moved our border controls to the French side of the Channel and we required all asylum seekers to carry a biometric Identity Card.

More recently we’ve created a new uniformed force called the UK Border Agency by combining officers of the Immigration Service, Customs and UK Visas into one unit and equipping it with additional powers and a bumper budget of £2 million.

But there’s more to do and that is why we are about to deliver the biggest changes to our immigration, system in a generation. We are rolling out a new Australian style points based system for immigration so that only those who benefit Britain can come here.

David Cameron has been playing catch-up in the security stakes by employing the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Lord Stevens to conduct his own review of border security and the Conservatives will no doubt launch his findings with a big song and dance at maximum volume.

What you won’t hear so much about is the fact that John Stevens has already declared his strong support for Labour’s Identity Card scheme which Mr Cameron’s Conservatives strongly oppose.

The Tories also plan to switch off our identity checking system for foreign nationals which would undermine our border controls and be a recipe for disorder. We've already used our new system to flag up over 16,000 immigration offenders who tried to make false applications for visas and soon the same database will be used to deliver ID cards for foreign nationals.

The current Met Commissioner and other senior police officers support Identity Cards as strongly as Lord Stevens who wrote in his News of the World column on August 13th 2006, "Another must for the Tories is to reconsider ID cards. The importance of knowing whether someone really is who they say they are has never been higher”