The Sketch: House parlance leaves spectators lost for words

We must have an end-to-end change in the immigration service, the Home Secretary told the House. Yes, a step change in its performance, Beverley Hughes agreed. As the Sketch has noted before, when ministers demand a step change it means they can't even get mail delivered.

Andrew MacKinlay asked why everything was taking so long to get better. He had been promised improvements so he was going to ask this same question in six months and if there weren't improvements "there was going to be one hell of a bloody row". This is unparliamentary language. The approved parliamentary term is "bloody buggering row".

Beverley Hughes blamed the Tories. This is a political party that ruled Britain many years ago. No one now remembers them. Ms Hughes said that when Labour came to power all those years ago, 4,000 illegal migrants a year were deported and now 13,000 a year were deported. Of course, nearly 100,000 a year now stay illegally, no wonder everyone was laughing.

She told another questioner: "I hope it takes a lot less than a year to screen out potential terrorists from Iraqi asylum-seekers!" Yet these politicians can't even identify the names of convicted sex offenders on the teaching rolls. They're unable to match one set of names against another – in this computer age it takes three-fifths of a second to clear 250,000 people. It took months. It probably still hasn't been done.

Someone asked: How many asylum-seekers have had their application refused? Beverly Hughes said she didn't know. That's like the Foreign Secretary saying he doesn't know where abroad is. George Osborne pointed out that gun crime had doubled from 12,000 offences a year to 22,000. He wanted the Home Secretary to stop offering a reduction in the rate of increase of the crime but an actual reduction. David Blunkett said, in his vocabulary, reducing did mean decreasing. Yes, and in the NHS vocabulary, "chairs" now mean "beds" and in the Transport vocabulary, "trains" means "buses". Labour's Neil Gerrard said asylum-seekers get a letter telling them their application has been successful; then have to wait up to eight months unable to work, until they get confirmation of their status. "Why is it impossible to send an official letter at the same time?" he asked, piteously.

Beverley Hughes said that when asylum-seekers had their applications rejected and wouldn't leave they were forcibly removed. Notice three things: 1) She hadn't understood the question. 2) She can't get a sensible letter delivered. 3) She wants to change the entire culture of her department.

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