"I Policed the Border for 40 Years - the System is Broken" - Tony Smith CBE

Tony Smith (0:02)

I was brought up really in a quite a tough, you know, enforcement world. This was well after the 1951 conventions were agreed on the European Convention on Human Rights and the Refugee Convention.

Konstantin Kisin (0:13)

And we've gone from that to what we have now, where to a lot of people, Tony, it feels like we don't have a border anymore. What's happened?

Tony Smith (0:22)

Asylum trumps border control. Somebody can literally get within the 12-mile zone, mention the magic word, and within 24 to 48 hours, be in one of our communities with minimal vetting. The most important thing, though, you should do is break the business model. How do you stop people wanting to come here in the first place? The only way you've got to do that is say, well, you're not going to get in.

Konstantin Kisin (0:44)

Solla Braverman, who was here recently, her argument is, you can't deal with this until you leave the ECHI.

Tony Smith (0:50)

No, you don't. You do need to do that, but you need to do a lot more stuff as well as that.

Konstantin Kisin (0:54)

So even that's not enough?

Tony Smith (0:56)

No, put all this international law stuff, because it's hopelessly out of date. It's broken. It's completely broken. It's no longer delivering what the asylum system was meant to deliver in the first place.

Konstantin Kisin (1:08)

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Francis Foster (1:22)

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Konstantin Kisin (1:30)

Tony Smith, welcome to TRIGGERnometry. Great to have you on the show. You had a full 40-year career in handling the immigration into this country, particularly border security, eventually rising to be in charge of all of it, the border force.

The question we really want to ask you is, what on earth is going on? But before we get to that, talk us through your career, tell us what you learned, what you saw, how you went through it, what people should know about the border force in this country and the way the borders are managed more broadly.

Tony Smith (2:00)

Yeah, okay. So I'm from London. I didn't go to university. I got my A levels. I didn't know what to do. I went and saw my careers manager and he said, well, have you thought about the civil service? I didn't really want to join in the police because quite a lot of my relatives were in the police. I don't really want to do that. But I do something a bit different. So they recommended that I don't try customs or something like that. So I put my application and before I knew it, I was appointed to the home office as an executive officer. And I started off dealing with extensions of stay from aliens. We used to call them aliens, with aliens and Commonwealth back then. And there wasn't much control over Commonwealth back then, but the aliens would apply to stay for studies or work or whatever. And you'd stamp their passport with another year or two years or three years, I'll refuse that. And then once I got into it, I started to realize that actually the real work, the real job was done at the border in an immigration service. So I became an immigration officer, which is a statutory role, actually, which gives you powers, pretty strong powers actually to arrest people, detain people, remove people. And I got posted to Heathrow Airport and I sat on the line there for about five years. You know, people would come up to my desk and they'd have to show me their passport, their landing card. I'd ask them questions about what you're coming here for, who are you, what you're doing.

And, well, if I didn't like the look of them, I just thought it was something funny. I could take them down, do the bags, have a look in there, and then make a judgment call about whether or not they were admissible to the country. And if not, then the power was vested in law, by law, Schedule II, Immigration Act, in me, to refuse entry on the authority of my chief. So I don't like the look of this guy. You know, he says he's coming on holiday, but I've just looked in his bag and he's got his waiters' uniform and his alarm clock with him and all these references. Why, I think he is coming on holiday, really, to be honest. So it was a credibility issue. And if I didn't believe him, I wasn't satisfied. I'd just send him straight back. And so I stayed at the airport for a while. Then I moved into London to immigration enforcement, that is to say dealing with people that are already in the country that got through somehow, that might be here illegally, did a lot of work with the police on arresting, you know, suspected overstayers, workers in breach, illegal entrance, little bit of organised crime stuff and the same thing really. If I found someone in London in the 80s, early 80s who didn't have a passport and couldn't explain how they were in the country, I could just arrest them and detain them and send them back. No call, which is why the police quite liked us, because the police would have to go through the criminal justice system, have to prosecute and go get magistrate and get a recommendation for deportation. Whereas we had these powers to remove people somehow early. And yeah, we removed people on letters. I'd write a letter to the captain of the aircraft, say this person is illegally in the UK, please take him back to wherever he was from, and give him a bit of paper with his photo on, saying to the chief immigration officer in Delhi Airport, wherever it was, and they would go back. So I was brought up really in quite a tough enforcement world, where actually immigration enforcement was really quite powerful. I just remember this was in the 70s and the 80s. This was well after the 1951 conventions were agreed on the European Convention on Human Rights and the Refugee Convention. But nobody claimed asylum back then. Nobody claimed human rights. I mean, mostly they'd just say, oh, fair enough, now, good cop guv, can I go and get some money out of the ATM and to take home with me and pick up a few bits and pieces, which we're usually trying to accommodate, and then they'd go back quietly. So I was brought up to believe that actually I had a really powerful role at the border in deciding who came in and who didn't come in, and in country, a really powerful role in who got to stay here and who got deported. So I did all that up until the 80s, and then I started to climb the ladder. I went into headquarters, immigration service headquarters, where you run into more sort of home office civil servants, which were dealing with broader home affairs issues and how immigration fit with that. Got promoted to chief immigration officer.