COUNTING THEM IN AND OUT

THE Wales Governance Centre has released a new report which reveals that many people leaving Welsh prisons are left homeless.
https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/news/view/2446679-less-than-half-of-welsh-prisoners-return-to-settled-accommodation-on-release,-report-says
It is broadly typically supportive of the Cardiff-based Welsh Labour-run government’s bid to devolve powers for justice and prisons from Westminster, where Home Secretary Priti Patel, who runs justice and prisons, has been busy probing the number of illegal immigrants and refugees coming into the UK, often in rubber dinghies across the English Channel.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8750075/Priti-Patel-plans-fly-1-000-migrants-Italy-Germany-France.html
The Cardiff university-based WGC, a research centre and think-tank researching law, politics, government and the economy of Wales and the wider territorial governance of the UK and Europe, was established shortly after the 1997 Welsh devolution referendum, and was founded by Barry Jones in 1999.
What I want to read is an accurate and authoritative report into how many illegal immigrants and refugees are now living in Wales and what the Welsh government would do about resolving this problem but raising this point in such circles is likely to risk me being labelled and insulted, since it challenges the prevailing political orthodoxy here.
Some other militant, territorial Welsh nationalists would also like to see an accurate and authoritative report of how many English people live here in second homes, which they think impacts negatively on local people by driving up property prices.
I have, for instance, asked researchers if they can establish exactly how many prisoners in Welsh jails – Cardiff, Swansea, the UK’s biggest jail, Berwyn in Wrexham, Bridgend and Usk – are English born with addresses outside Wales to compare it with the number who are Welsh born with addresses here.
My suspicion is that this kind of information is now practically impossible to establish for a number of reasons whereas the total number of prisoners who end sentences and leave with nowhere for them to live is rather easier to establish.
Keeping an accurate record of incomers into a country and out-goers as well as the number of homeless people is essential, especially at times of war and, of course, in an international pandemic.
This was traditionally based on Census information, electoral rolls and national registers such as the one in 1939 giving citizens established identity cards to claim second world war food rations, health care and other essentials.
Huge numbers of homeless people now live in shrubs and woodland and under flyovers as well as illegal immigrants and refugees in hiding or living under the radar packed six-to-a-room on the floor working in the black economy.
My second fear is that new laws to protect privacy, many emanating from the European Union in Brussels, as well as to protect minorities, mean they no longer have to state ethnic origin, gender and status, religion nor, indeed, much that aids in accurately defining and auditing them for so doing would offend their human rights.
Historical censuses which asked you to state if you were an imbecile or simple minded were offensive but the reaction against that kind of abuse has led to a trend which further and further denies rather than allows open accountability and accurate audit.

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