Even the dying are deported

We're familiar with people being deported despite being under the threat of death if they return 'home', which is bad enough, but it really does take some doing to deport someone who's actually dying, yet this is what's happened to a Ghanaian woman whose visa ran out:

A Ghanaian woman who came to the UK five years ago and became a student is being flown back to the African country, despite being terminally ill.

Ama Sumani was taken by immigration officers from a Cardiff hospital where she has been receiving dialysis for a year after cancer damaged her kidneys. [1]

How low can you get? How can people who take decisions like this carry on a normal, human life? I'm sure the civil servants who make decisions like this are (mostly) human and are capable of compassion in their personal lives, yet when they come to work any compassion, solidarity and empathy for other humans goes out of the window. It must take a degree of doublethink and compartmentalisation that is beyond you and I. That, and complete unaccountability. Lives may be irreparably ruined and people may be killed because of what they do, but they'll go happily into an index-linked retirement and live out their days untouched by their own actions.

Yeah, I know, responsibility is diffused in bureaucracies, and the ultimate responsibility rests with politicians who make the laws, who themselves would blame the electorate for voting for them in the first place, but someone, somewhere has to be responsible and accountable. Bureacracies may be machines of State, but they're machines composed of human beings who ought, at the least, to feel some shame for what they're part of. Or maybe they don't even realise, viscerally, that there's a real person at the end of the chain of decisions - maybe being part of the machine means that you don't see people, you just see names on paper, abstractions that have no corporeal existence. Or maybe, if you do have a conscience and sense of responsibility, you don't get appointed to posts where such decisions are made, or you quit the bureaucracy in shame and disgust.

[1] Cancer patient loses visa battle, BBC News online, 9/1/08

Liberty in Scotland

According to a story on today's BBC website, Scotland is freer, or rather less unfree, than England by some margin. The group Privacy International apparently scored Scotland higher than the UK as a whole:

The UK as a whole scored 1.4 on the report's scale - the worst of any European country. But Scotland fared much better, with a rating of 2.5.

The report quoted a SNP MP:

Mr Wishart, the MP for Perth and North Perthshire, said: "This report highlights how people's civil liberties are safer in Scotland - particularly after the Scottish Parliament voted to oppose ID cards just last month."

The last bit of which came as news, though welcome news, to me. Sadly the Scots don't have control over such 'strategic' home policy, in the same way as they've no sway over immigration policy, despite the fact that Scotland is crying out for more people to arrest the decline in its population. The privacy rating isn't surprising as I've always considered Scotland to be a civilised country compared to its barbarian neighbour to the South.

It's about time that the country obtained its long-awaited, and much-needed independence, of which it was so mendaciously cheated back in the 70s when the independence referendum was rigged by the Callaghan regime and the true income from North Sea Oil was deliberately concealed. When independence eventually arrives, which I'd hope would be in the next decade before England's rapid decline drags the Scots down with it, I want to be sure to be on the right side of the Border.

Civil Liberty praise for Scotland, BBC Online, 6/1/08