Oh dear...

[johnny9fingers]

The Home Office seem to have stuffed this one up:
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jan/14/revealed-uk-concealed-failure-to-alert-eu-over-75000-criminal-convictions

Oops. Now... who was Home Secretary when this happened?

As is I quote from the piece:

“Sophie in’t Veld, a Dutch MEP on the European parliament’s committee on civil liberties, justice and home affairs, told the Guardian there was a wealth of evidence that the UK could not be trusted.

“This is yet another scandal that casts a very dark shadow over security and law enforcement cooperation,” she said.

“After the revelations of deliberate abuse of the Schengen Information System, and earlier scandals like the hack of [the Belgian telecoms provider] Proximus by GCHQ, it is clear that the principle of ‘mutual trust’ will not work.

“This revelation of the failure to alert authorities on criminals and the cover up afterwards casts serious doubts on the UK as a reliable partner.

“The purpose of information exchange is enhancing security. If one side fails to deliver, security gains are zero and cooperation pointless. The UK government has to consider very carefully how it intends to restore trust, bearing in mind negotiations have to be concluded by autumn of this year.”

Officials believe the failure to alert EU partners is down to the police national computer, a database containing information on millions of convicted criminals and their jail records.”

GCHQ is doing a necessary task for everyone in NATO, which is most of the EU including Belgium. But the rest is pretty much spot on.

Dash it chaps, if we are going to go it alone we will still need allies. I guess Ms Patel will need to get together with Mr Raab to thrash out a sensible and unified response from both the HO and the FO. This is uncharted water, obvs; but it looks as if the FO and HO are going to have to work together a bit better from here on in. After all they are both promoting Britain’s interest to markets both internal and external.