By David Rosser-Owen
October 22, 2009

As a result of a Cabinet Office report, the UK Border Agency came into being just over a year ago. In fact it was on 1 April 2008; and this unhappy association with April Fools' Day seems to be being played out in various ways. Two of these have appeared this week. One displays the cultural myopia of the London ruling elite. This extravagance through the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) failed in 2007 to put forward the Gaelic language film Seachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle to the Oscars in Los Angeles, despite the American awarding body asking for it. In fact, BAFTA has no category that can accommodate Britain's ancient tongues of Welsh, Gaelic, Manx, and Cornish other than as "Foreign Language" films. This insulting and ignorant perspective seems to have found its way into the UK Border Agency.

On 9 June 2009, the Agency, without explanation, returned two young women, Evelyn Calcabrini and Shirley Edwards, to their homes in Puerto Madryn in Argentina's Patagonia province. The two women were on their way to Wales to continue their studies in the Welsh language. Wales has long historic and cultural associations with Patagonia. This is a fact known to just about everybody who lives in Wales except, it would seem, HM Secretary of State for Wales, the South African born Peter Hain. As a consequence, and in protest at this high-handed and ignorant behaviour, CeltFest has decided to cancel a Welsh festival that was planned for next month to coincide with a rugby match between Argentina and Wales partly amid fears that artists travelling from Argentina for the event will be turned away by the Agency. This is likely to cost the Welsh economy a six figure sum. Instead, CeltFest say they will be concentrating their efforts on another event on 7 November which will coincide with a rugby international between New Zealand and Wales. Shirley Edwards will be a guest of honour.

The lawyer for Evelyn Calcabrini has said that the UK government is insisting on taking the case to a tribunal, which will be held in Welsh in Birmingham in November. Yet, while focusing its attentions on denying entry to the culturally-linked Welsh Patagonians, this same Agency it seems has lost track of up to 40, 000 suspected illegal immigrants. This astonishing figure was admitted by the Home Office in the evening of Tuesday, 20 October. The 40, 000 had arrived in the UK legally but had had their requests to extend their stays turned down. Unlike Shirley Edwards and Evelyn Calcabrini, the Home Office did not deport them and has no record of them leaving the country.

In a letter to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, Mrs Lin Homer, the chief executive of the Agency, also revealed that some 74, 000 asylum seekers have been allowed to stay under a controversial amnesty. The letter further contained the unwelcome news that of the 1,000 foreign convicts freed by the Home Office in 2006, only 860 have been deported and 85 have never been found. It would appear that it's much easier to get tough with Welsh Patagonian students, than for the Agency actually to do its job... whatever that is.

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