It’s worth reading this story in full from the Eastern Daily Press . It’s about the threatened deportation of a young Eritrean teenager from Norfolk.

This is how ‘helpful’ some government departments can be:

“We’ve sent a letter to Tony Blair but had no reply, no names appear on any of the paperwork to contact and whenever we phone the immigration service we’re passed from one machine to another.”

There is a ’stay of grace’ until March 6 - after which he could be deported at any time.

The lack of any person to talk to is one minor aspect of this story. There is a much wider and bigger context here that all of this policy development around e-government occurs within a certain political environment. And one which has a distinctly nasty and brutish core.

All those who froth at the mouth about ‘immigrants’ should take a trip to the Norfolk countryside where they would discover vast amounts of very cheap migrant labour working long hours on low pay on some of the richest agricultural land in Britain.

I personally do not understand why someone who has settled into life in this country needs to be deported anywhere. Why can’t they stay? I’m sure the money spent by the immigration service on hunting people down could be better spent providing schools or hospitals or services to people.

Britain, Blair, 2006 - is this really progress?