What can Great Britain’s Tony Blair say about this except “OOPS!”:
More than 1,000 convicted foreign criminals, including killers, rapists and child abusers, have been freed from prison without being considered for deportation and hundreds are missing, Charles Clarke, the home secretary, admitted yesterday.
All the prisoners had committed crimes that should have triggered automatic assessment for removal from the country and the majority should have expected to be expelled. About 160 were released without being considered for removal despite explicit recommendations by judges that they should be deported at the end of their sentences.
Such is the chaos in the system for dealing with “foreign national prisoners� that home office officials were unable to say last night whether they had found three foreign murderers — who should be on life-long licence — nine rapists and five paedophiles among the 1,023 prisoners released since 1999.
Clarke said he regretted the fiasco, which also involved his department giving “misleading� information to MPs.
“I take responsibility for it,� he said. “It is a shocking state of affairs. We are taking it extremely seriously but I don’t think this is a resignation matter.�The home office is still not sure what offences 103 of the prisoners were jailed for and says it does not know how many have re-offended since being freed.
But, as the BBC notes here, that isn’t the end to Blair’s mounting problems:
Tony Blair must wake each morning wondering what appalling new headline will scream at him over his breakfast cereal.
Calls for Home Secretary Charles Clarke’s resignation over the foreign criminals affair – as it emerged he had known of the problem for months but failed to stop it – would have been bad enough.
But he was also greeted by the revelation – with a series of full colour photographs – that the deputy prime minister, John Prescott, had had an affair which had left his wife “devastated”.
But an affair is an affair — and dangerous criminals freed and lost amid the general population is quite another matter. In an editorial, the Herald thundered:
I failed, we failed, they failed: not an abbreviated conjugation of a regular verb but the sound of a discredited home secretary consuming a big slice of humble pie, washed down with a large glass of candour. It is doubtful whether Charles Clarke will survive in his job and doubtful if he ought to, following his admission that even after he was warned of the problem, British prisons continued releasing into the community foreign inmates who should have been assessed for deportation.
This is the man responsible for a policy that grabs small children from their beds and promising students from their university studies to incarcerate them prior to deportation because long-running asylum claims have been rejected. Now we find that the same man has been presiding over a system that has allowed three murderers, five paedophiles, 34 other sex attackers and around 1000 other foreign national prisoners to be released from jails in England and Wales without any consideration of whether they should be deported.
Declared the Financial Times: “If the Home Office were a horse it would have been shot by now.”
Times Online doesn’t think Blair should be packing his bags just yet:
THE Government had a whole annus horribilis packed into 24 hours yesterday.
You just had to look at Tony Blair’s face after Prime Minister’s Questions, the worst of his premiership. No spin, no rationalisations, no excuses can disguise the awfulness of the combination of the foreign prisoners fiasco, the lurid Falstaffian disclosures about John Prescott’s affair and the heckling of Patricia Hewitt at the nurses’ conference. But just how bad are these events for Mr Blair and Labour?
It is misleading to link them under an umbrella term such as sleaze….These troubles could not have come at a worse time for Labour, with local elections only a week off. The two most recent polls…But comparisons with the final days of the Major Government, and talk of a Labour meltdown, are misplaced. For all its current troubles, Labour is still in a much stronger position than the Tories were ten years ago…. The Tories are right to sense a Government in deep trouble. But power is still a long way off.
But what’s he to do? Perhaps a new press spokesman might help. But, alas, Fox News’ Tony Snow is already taken by George Bush (is Sean Hannity looking around?).
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.