The Home Office is running a Twitter campaign warning illegal immigrants “there will be no hiding place”. It seems to have slightly misjudged the tone, though, coming across as more like “authoritarian police state” than “doing a tough but necessary job”:
There will be no hiding place for illegal immigrants with the new #ImmigrationBill pic.twitter.com/HH2JGDKnRq
— The Home Office (@ukhomeoffice) July 3, 2013
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Britain is open to brightest & best but uncontrolled migration has to be dealt with #ImmigrationBill http://t.co/6nzD8B6wgH
— The Home Office (@ukhomeoffice) July 3, 2013
A quick glance at the replies to the first tweet shows that it didn’t go down too well.
.@ukhomeoffice you'd fit right in in Germany circa 1936
— Peter Pannier (@PeterPannier) July 3, 2013
@ukhomeoffice you need to take a long hard look at your life
— Tim Hardy (@bc_tmh) July 3, 2013
@ukhomeoffice yeah you might want to consider how you're approaching this whole social media thing really.
— Thomas Blythe™ (@thomasblythe) July 3, 2013
.@ukhomeoffice The long and noble tradition of making humans live in fear of "the knock on the door".
— Huw Lemmey (@spitzenprodukte) July 3, 2013
@RyanJohnNelson @ukhomeoffice Immigration is a massive problem that we must deal with, but this picture is not neccessary & breeds racism!
— J-TRAIN (@stilltrendy) July 3, 2013
What really sticks, though, was the disconnect between the reasons given for the raid in the video and the footage shown. While immigration minister Mark Harper is talking about “substandard, overcrowded accommodation”, the camera pans over… a small messy bedroom.
It’s certainly substandard and overcrowded, but it’s also a bedroom in a shared house in West London. The Home Office is basically using the South East’s broken housing market to justify going Judge Dredd on immigrants.