On Wednesday night I stumbled across a few episodes of The Bill from 2002 on whatever UK Gold calls itself this week.
(And before some of you start grumbling: Here he goes again, banging on about ancient TV shows, it’ll be The Sweeney or Minder next… bear with me.)
The storyline revolves around an operation to catch an Albanian people smuggler. It kicks off when a lorry packed with illegal immigrants, hidden in fridges imported from Holland, overturns in Sun Hill.
This human cargo scatters to the four winds when the back cargo doors are flung open. Later, suspicions are aroused when PCs Dave Quinnan and Tony Stamp spot four dodgy, foreign-looking men stumbling down a street in a leafy suburb.
When the illegals see the police car they leg it into a nearby wood. Quinnan and Stamp give chase but the illegals make good their escape, save for one who turns out to be an undercover officer who is looking for his sister who has been trafficked to Britain from Albania.
Long story short, Sun Hill sets up a sting operation in a hotel which the people smuggler intends to turn into a brothel. He’s aided and abetted by a bent immigration officer who waves through the lorries filled with illegals.
Eventually the missing sister is rescued from a knocking shop at the back of a billiard hall, where she has been forced into prostitution, and co-operates with police by identifying one of the Albanian’s henchmen, who has murdered another migrant and dumped him in the Thames.
Migrants disembark from a Border Force boat at Ramsgate Port in Kent this week
These days migrants need only hop on a rubber dinghy in France, from where an obliging Border Force will pick them up mid-Channel, issue life jackets and ferry them to Britain, writes Richard Littlejohn
So there’s a happy ending after the sister is given indefinite leave to remain in exchange for her evidence, plus the possibility that she will face reprisals – certain death even – if she is returned home?
Er, not as such. Despite her co-operation with the Bill and the fact that she has genuinely been forced into what today we would call ‘modern slavery’, her asylum claim is refused without leave to appeal and she’s put on the first plane out. A heartless immigration officer has no sympathy. He shrugs: ‘She’s a prostitute and she has no right to be here.’
Not for the first time when watching an old TV programme, I’ve thought to myself: They’d never get away with that now. The only surprise was that it didn’t come with a now-obligatory trigger warning.
OK, so the series in question is 24 years old, although it seems like only yesterday. Yet the storyline is as relevant today as it was then. In fact, crimes associated with people-smuggling and illegal immigration are far worse than they were in 2002.
Back in the early Noughties, the public was waking up to the massive increase in immigration, both legal and illegal, under Labour – which was ‘scouring the world’ for migrants to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’.
Even so, the authorities were still getting tough on people-smuggling and determined to deport those with no right to be in Britain, despite the fact that the pernicious Human Rights Act had already been in force for four years.
The Bill accurately reflected the mood of the time. ‘Smashing the gangs’ was something the government still allegedly took seriously, not just a trite Surkeir soundbite.
Today, however, the episodes in question wouldn’t reflect any kind of reality. Quite the opposite. So what’s changed?
For a start, there’s no need to go to such elaborate lengths as hiding illegals in fridges in the back of lorries. These days migrants need only hop on a rubber dinghy in France, from where an obliging Border Force will pick them up mid-Channel, issue life jackets and ferry them to Britain.
(I notice the Border Force vessel involved is called ‘Defender’. Talk about a sick joke. They’d be more accurate if they called it ‘Uber’.)
Nor would there be any necessity to bribe a bent immigration officer to turn a blind eye. As the tenacious Sue Reid reported in the Mail this week, cross-Channel migrants – most of them without any form of identification – are waved through in just 30 minutes after a cursory interview and given fresh clothes before being taken off to a comfy billet, complete with free food, medical care and pocket money.
As the Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said: ‘We have no idea who they are or where they come from. They are mostly young men, many of whom go on to commit sexual offences and crimes in the UK.’
These days dodgy, foreign-looking males in designer tracksuits are a regular sight on the streets of our leafy suburbs, often hanging around ‘Turkish’ barber shops or bogus ‘Greek’ bakeries run by Albanians.
But far from trying to detain and question them, modern-day PCs Dave Quinnan and Tony Stamp would drive on by, fearful of being accused of ‘racism’. And the young men know it, puffing away defiantly on duty-free cigarettes smuggled into Britain and knocked out illegally in corner shops and ‘continental delis’.
As for the central Albanian gangster character, he wouldn’t have to commandeer a hotel. He’d have been bussed to the nearest Hilton the moment he got off the boat and could run his criminal empire from there.
In the unlikely event of him actually being arrested, the chances of him being convicted and deported would be less than zero. His appeals would last years, all costs met by the mug British taxpayer.
He’d probably claim that because he’d got one of the women he trafficked pregnant and owned a pet Rottweiler he had the ‘right to a family life’. It’s his yuman rites, innit?
Nor would there be any danger of the rescued sister being sent home. She too would be entitled to the best lawyers British taxpayers’ money could buy. Even though she’d been working as a prostitute, it was under duress and although she’d entered Britain illegally she would be guaranteed our sympathy.
After giving evidence, she’d get a new identity and disappear into witness protection.
These episodes of The Bill judged by today’s standards have about as much in common with modern reality as Dixon of Dock Green.
Yesterday, the Government claimed to have deported 60,000 migrants in the past 18 months. But 80 per cent of them went voluntarily – no doubt with a few quid from the poor box, like the Epping sex offender – and only four per cent were among the 200,000 who have arrived on small boats over the past eight years. And still they keep coming in their tens of thousands.
Reform UK’s pledge to deport 600,000 if it wins the next election looks, I’m afraid to say, unrealistic. The Blob, the yuman rites racket, the migration lobby, Labour, the Greens, the Lib Dems, the Lords, the Church of England, would move heaven and earth to stop them and they’d be tied up in the courts for years.
Watching The Bill again this week, I couldn’t help reflecting on how drastically – and how rapidly – Britain has changed over the past quarter-century, to the point of being unrecognisable in many areas. And not for the better.
Left-wing judicial and political activism is out of control, and we now have a complete and utter lawyer of a Prime Minister who always, always puts unaccountable foreign courts and conventions ahead of the interests of the British people.
Policing, especially, has undergone an unwelcome PC transformation. No wonder The Bill was cancelled in 2010, just as the yuman rites revolution was getting into full swing. The scripts wouldn’t get past the sensitivity censors today.
Sun Hill nick would inevitably have been shut down years ago, along with hundreds of other High Street police stations. By now, it would probably have been turned into an asylum hostel.
