Common Knowledge is often just bollocks, this is because people are lazy and stupid and simple stories are easier to remember than a complicated history and, you know, facts.

Britain being a Soft touch on Immigration, is one a great example. Go ask some one on the street about Immigration, and they’ll tell you how foreign paedophiles fly in on golden aeroplanes, are welcomed into the country, given a seventeen bedroom mansion AND GUESS WHO’S PAYING? Even Judges are drooling out similar nonsense.

Reality of course is a much more complicated and slippery bastard (Like a Fish designed by Ernő Rubik). Looking deeper into the issue (or just researching on the internet for five minutes) you’ll quickly find a lucky few immigrants pass the points-based system for citizenship and the citizenship test, but for the majority (including children) there is detention, and deportation.

The job of sorting all this out falls to the Border Agency, which is where where it all starts to go wrong. First of all, you wouldn’t want to be on their Christmas Card list and secondly a whistleblower has exposed some of them as a bunch a racist cunts.

Highlights include;

staff kept a stuffed gorilla, a “grant monkey”, which was placed as a badge of shame on the desk of any officer who approved an asylum application.

Well, that doesn’t sound to bad…

one official boasted to her that he tested the claims of boys from African countries who said they had been forcibly conscripted as child soldiers by making them lie down on the floor and demonstrate how they shot at people in the bush.

Oh, that’s not good.

One method used to determine the authenticity of an asylum seeker claiming to be from North Korea was to ask whether the person ate chop suey.

Well it can’t get any worse, can it?

a superior nevertheless decided the woman and her children should be removed, and asked officials whether there were any grounds to remove them. Frustrated, she approached a member of the legal department. His reply, according to Perrett, was: “Umbongo, umbongo, they kill them in the Congo.”

Well, what a twat, not only is he a hideous unfeeling racist, he has also spoilt one of my fondest childhood television memories.

Of course this all could be made up by the whistleblower, and I’m sure we will hear more about it in the coming weeks, but it all goes to show how reality is can be very different from common perception of it. I give you one last quote from a manager at the UK Border Agency

If it was up to me I’d take them all outside and shoot them.

UPDATE 03/02/2010 - Duncan Stott who tweated the original story has a blog post on this that is worth reading.