I’ve said before that I think merging the Inland Revenue with Customs and Excise wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but shifting the Law Enforcement side over to the Border Force helped to unbalance HM Revenue and Customs moral compass.  Even so, while researching the HM Customs on TV articles, I’ve been struck by the antagonistic attitude of the press. In 1986 the Sunday Mirror trailed The Collectors TV series by asking readers if they’d, “ever tried to smuggle a bottle of booze or packet of ciggies through the customs? And cursed the peaked-cap Customs man for an interfering busybody?” And in the Belfast News Letter, columnist Charles Fitzgerald began his review of The Duty Men by saying, “If you believe that Governments should not interrupt the free circulation of such indispensable items by imposing monstrous taxes on them and pricing them out of reach, then like me you’ll not think beating the Revenue to be much of a crime, “ and boasting, “many’s the bottle of good French...

  In the past few weeks, as refugees are turned away and charity shipments to the Ukraine get stalled at the borders because they don’t have customs paperwork, the term “jobsworth” has been slung around at the Home Office, Border Force and HMRC (and private contractors).  Now that things have calmed down a bit, it’s made me look back at being a “jobsworth”. I’ve just done a bit of research and found that the term became popular in the 1970’s when Esther Rantzen used to present a “Jobsworth of the Week” award on her TV show, That’s Life. The idea seems to be that a “jobsworth” is not just someone who rigidly applies the rules (as their contract of employment requires) but that they gleefully take the most rigid and obstructive interpretation of those rules, just to make life difficult. A lot of the folk who shout “jobsworth” do it when they’re wound up. Give them five minutes to calm down, and they’d admit it was unreasonable. But there are others who seem to have a Donald Trum...

When the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise came together as HM Revenue and Customs in 2005, it  had a solid backbone of officers on the Law Enforcement side (what people generally thought of as Customs officers) backed up by many more International Trade specialists. From the perspective of Cream Team Duty, the Law Enforcement officers checked how many scones you had in your suitcase, while the International Trade officers checked that you'd declared the correct Tariff code for your clotted cream imports. Then, in July 2007, Gordon Brown had a vision of anyone entering the country being met by, "a single, uniformed checkpoint for passport control and customs." In early 2008, those Customs staff were shunted off to the new UK Border Agency. For both sides, there was ambiguity as to who was responsible for what. HMRC still owned Customs policy, but the UKBA was responsible for enforcing it. HMRC retained the International Trade auditors, but UKBA caught the smugglers*. ...