Bill Carmichael: Open doors policy will come back to haunt us

I WAS once involved in an exercise with an internationally known company planning what they called a DSP – a disaster recovery programme.

The imaginary scenario was that a dirty bomb had exploded in central London, close to the company’s headquarters.

The combination of conventional explosives and radioactive material had killed dozens, caused widespread panic, jammed communications and brought all transport to a halt.

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The dangers from radioactivity meant that large part of the capital would be sealed off for the foreseeable future.

Our task was to prepare alternative arrangements – premises, personnel, management structures and computer systems – to keep essential company functions running during the crisis.

At one point, I asked the security consultant who devised the scenario whether it was all a bit far-fetched, and wouldn’t we be better off planning for something more likely to happen.

His answer was blunt and emphatic: “It is not a question of if something like this will happen, just a question of when.”

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His view, common among the mainly ex-military guys involved in the security industry, was that the UK, and London in particular, was so infiltrated with violent jihadists that an atrocity directed against civilians was all but inevitable.

This was several years before the 7/7 bombings in 2005.

The catastrophic consequences of the last Labour government’s open door immigration policy will continue to dog us for years.

This week, WikiLeaks released a new batch of documents, this time detailing the backgrounds of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

No fewer than 35 members of al-Qaida held by the Americans originated in the UK, where they had been indoctrinated by the hateful sermons of foreign-born preachers.

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A combination of open borders, absurdly generous benefits and the fact that our security services turned a blind eye to terrorism, attracted dozens of Islamic militants from around the globe.

But what is even worse is that once these dangerous characters had been safely locked up at Guantanamo Bay, our governments were, for some unfathomable reason, desperately keen to take them back again.

Take, for example, the case of Binyam Mohamed, an al-Qaida member who admitted to the Americans planning a dirty bomb attack precisely the same as the one imagined in the disaster scenario I mentioned earlier.

Mohamed is an Ethiopian national who was living in Afghanistan and travelled to Pakistan, where he was arrested for using a forged passport.

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He was taken to Morocco and then handed over to the US before being incarcerated in Cuba. So where does he end up on his release? The UK where he is now living on benefits and compensation claimed from British taxpayers. The reason? He was, for a brief period, a “British resident”.

Of course he was! Every jihadi worth his salt from across the globe has been a “British resident” at some point. Are we going to take them all in?

We must be stark, staring mad.

This would be hilarious if it wasn’t so serious.

A pub singer from the Isle of Wight has been arrested for “racially aggravated harassment” – in other words a race hate crime – for singing Kung Fu Fighting at one of his gigs.

Simon Ledger had already started the number, which he includes in all his sets, when a Chinese man who happened to be walking past started yelling obscenities. Police, who clearly have nothing better to do, were alerted and they tracked down Simon – who has having a meal at a Chinese restaurant – and arrested him.

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Perhaps I’m being culturally insensitive, but from my recollection of the lyrics there is nothing remotely offensive or racist in the 1974 hit.

And didn’t a black man originally sing it? He is a racist too? More seriously “race hate” crimes are a serious and growing threat to free expression.

You don’t have any “right” not to be offended. In fact, being offended every once in a while is the small price we pay for living in a free country.