This tweet re-appeared yesterday along with a comment from Paul Bernal, a tweeter I often agree with. He was responding to how the Home Office is currently behaving towards our borders and Scotland and I have included his comment below. However having seen it I then checked out some of the other recent Home Office tweets from the last month and these raised far more concerns for me about how the Home Office is communicating with us all. It seems very clear that they need to change their social media policy if this month is consistent with the rest of their time. Over this period there were a total of 168 tweets of which 86 were retweets and 82 were written by the Department itself including the one shown here. Inevitably many of the retweets came from other Government people or Departments, the No 10 Prime Minister tweets were repeated 22 times and Priti Patel as their boss was retweeted 10 times. Two other Home Office Ministers were repeated 4 times in total and there were a total of 28 retweets from other Governmental Departments. The Health and Social Care Department was at the top getting 10 and the Treasury and Northern Ireland got one each. In the middle was the Ministry of Justice which one might assume would be a stronger link but they only had 4 repeats and there were also 12 from the whole set of UK Police forces including the NCA. There was one retweet from the RAF, one from Heathrow Airport, five from five charities and one from Lego.

There were two other retweets one of which was from Channel 5 and it related to an interview with Victoria Atkins which was a problematic issue and the retweet was a credible form of communication. However the other one came from Chris Philp and it was related to one of his Telegraph articles about closing borders. This of course is consistent with Priti Patels policies and had it been one of her tweets that would have been more acceptable. However for the Home Office to promote one of their Ministers personal articles in the Daily Telegraph seems concerning as it was not a Government interview and the Telegraph is not meant to be a Government portal. That said there were more concerning elements in the Departments own tweeting.

Their 82 own tweets varied enormously and many of them made sense and a few were not something I agreed with, but that is irrelevant. However out of all of the 168 tweets almost none of them had a personal impact apart from the Ministerial ones and the one I referred to above. That however was not the most disturbing. There were four tweets that were written directly addressing issues raised by Nigel Farage about the border issues. So apart from Nigel Farage and Chris Philp all other tweets did not deal with people who were individually making comments about Government policies and attitudes. Along with the four directed personally to Nigel there were another four linked together that then sought to explain the Departments response to his comments.

So finally there was one tweet which applauded the 1 year anniversary of Priti Patel as their Home Secretary and the one shown above. Perhaps the celebration of Priti Patel is what the Department sees as important and then of course the visit she made (several tweets did relate to this) to Scotland to demonstrate how borders will be dealt with. The comment from Paul Bernal is:

Paul Bernal  @PaulbernalUK – Nice to see you getting ready to enforce the border between England and the soon-to-be-independent Scotland.

Paul and I both anticipate that Scotland will shortly try and possibly succeed in breaking away from the UK. Although one of the reasons for this will be the EU departure, arguably our attitude towards immigrants will also feature. Scotland is a nation that over several centuries was forced to send many of its residents outside of the UK because of the appalling behaviour by English people who owned the land in locations such as the outer Hebrides. Our current rejection of immigrants is seen very badly by a wide number of Scottish people!