The plan to house hundreds of asylum seekers at a military base in Inverness is one of the Home Office’s most hare-brained ideas.
Granted, competition is fierce, but even by the low standards of the most disaster-prone government department it’s barmy, and reckless.
For those who have forgotten the details, the proposal is to accommodate 300 asylum seekers at Cameron Barracks in the centre of Inverness.
Sir Keir Starmer is determined to put a stop to protests outside hotels where many of them currently live, by hook or by crook.
Hence the bid to despatch some of them to the Highlands to live in a barracks, though it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that it’s just as easy to protest outside an Army installation as it is near a hotel.
Predictably, many local residents are concerned about the potential impact and there’s precious little reassurance from the civil servants supposedly in charge of the process.
As the Mail revealed yesterday, cash-strapped NHS Highland also now faces a bill of more than £1.3million to facilitate the base, including the provision of sexual health clinics, vaccinations, and mental health support.
Cameron Barracks has been earmarked to house up to 300 asylum seekers
Prime Minister Keir Startmer is determined to put a stop to protests outside asylum hotels
Sadeq Nikzad was jailed for nine years for rape of teenage girl in Falkirk
The sum includes £25,665 for monthly sexual health clinics offering blood-borne virus screening at weekends, with ‘condoms available’.
Another £87,067 will go on mental health services, with dedicated support provided to residents 365 days a year, while £115,740 will be required for extra capacity for translation services.
The biggest individual cost is for the workforce required, at £629,298.
This comes at a time when the board is having to make cuts in an effort to reduce its forecast deficit from £115million to £40million.
In 2024–25, NHS Highland recorded the longest waiting times for adult mental health treatment in Scotland, with some patients waiting more than seven years to start treatment.
For those languishing on waiting lists and desperate for help, it’s a bitter pill to swallow that thousands will be spent on mental health support for migrants.
There will also be two nurses and an admin assistant at the barracks – and a social worker to address ‘support and protection issues’.
Again, at a time of acute social worker shortages it’s another burden for the public purse which many will find hard to bear.
Last October it emerged that taxpayers will be billed more than £1million to revamp the barracks – so the costs are racking up.
As for security on-site, there’s a Home Office fact sheet online which doesn’t provide a lot of comfort.
We’re told that ‘all asylum claimants are subject to… mandatory security checks to confirm their identity and to link it to their biometric details for the purpose of immigration, security and criminality checks’.
The website states that this will include checks of ‘databases for, amongst other things, convictions, pending prosecutions, wanted or missing reports as well as fingerprints and photographs’.
Well, that’s all right, then, except that it’s hard to see how those checks will work on small boat migrants, usually from chaotic or war-torn countries without much semblance of stable government or officialdom.
We’re being asked to take a lot on trust and yet we know from long experience that things can go spectacularly wrong.
You might remember the story of Sadeq Nikzad who raped a 15-year-old girl after claiming asylum in Britain. He had lived as a tourist in three European cities before arriving in the UK.
The Mail on Sunday revealed he travelled through at least three safe countries before arriving in Falkirk, where he attacked a schoolgirl just yards from his migrant hostel. He was jailed for nine years for rape.
Extraordinary images suggested that Nikzad’s trip through Italy, Germany and France before arriving on British soil was more of a luxury tourist adventure than a fight to flee persecution or danger.
The Home Office also states that if ‘criminal activity occurs on site’, the ‘provider running [it] will have robust processes in place to report incidents to the police’.
Mind you, police have opted out of fully investigating thousands of ‘minor’ crimes, as we revealed last week, so Police Scotland may not be much help, depending on the nature of the complaint.
The site is also a strict ‘no alcohol zone’, and the Home Office ‘will continue to ensure the no alcohol rule is enforced’.
That said, the barracks will be ‘run by an experienced, specialist asylum accommodation provider’, so presumably it will get the blame if or when there’s a problem, in the best traditions of Whitehall buck-passing.
The SNP has championed mass immigration for years, and John Swinney has accused some people who protested outside the barracks of ‘expressing racist views’.
Now it’s racist to raise concern about sending hundreds of asylum seekers to a city with a population of around 60,000, after minimal or non-existent consultation. Yet even the First Minister said the Home Office plans had been drawn up ‘on the back of an envelope’ – though in fairness the same is true of most Nationalist policies.
The SNP council in Glasgow is in the midst of a housing crisis as it scrambles to find accommodation for migrants in the UK’s asylum capital.
It will need to slash services or hike taxes to pay for putting up a lot of them in hotels, where they’re not eligible for housing benefit.
Yet for many years the SNP in the city and at a national level was a firm advocate of the multicultural benefits of asylum and immigration.
It’s now reaping what it sowed as Glasgow has become a magnet for small boat migrants, taking advantage of lax SNP laws obliging local authorities to provide accommodation for the homeless, regardless of where they’ve come from.
The SNP’s stance is echoed by the madcap Greens, who might prop up an SNP government at Holyrood after the election in May in a reprise of the ill-fated double act which followed the last Holyrood vote, back in 2021.
John Swinney's SNP fervently supports mass immigration
Last year Green MSP Ariane Burgess said Scotland needs ‘at least one million more’ immigrants to ‘work the land’ and tackle climate change.
She admitted it would create a challenge for the Highlands – which may not be ready for the ‘multicultural’ impact of a mass influx (though they’re about to get a taste of it in Inverness).
Ms Burgess said migrants may be better suited to farming than indigenous Scots and the country must ‘be welcoming’.
The truth is that all political parties have failed us and we’re saddled with governments which lost control of our borders – or refused to speak out when it was happening.
Confronted with the toxic fallout, they try to rewrite history, blame everyone else – or tell off the voters for being racist.
Now we’re all having to pick up the pieces, including residents of one of the UK’s smallest cities – whether they like it or not.
