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  1. Politics
4 July 2013

The Home Office wants immigrants to be afraid

The most authoritarian of the government departments also has an authoritarian twitter account.

By Alex Hern

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”:

 

 

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A quick glance at the replies to the first tweet shows that it didn’t go down too well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.