Is this really what freedom of movement supporters want?

The news outlets carried a story earlier this week which shows how freedom of movement purists lost the plot and proves that David Cameron's attempt at renegotiation was pathetic.

Afghan-born Jamshid Piruz was convicted of assaulting two police officers with a claw hammer as they investigated a burglary. One officer sustained head injuries. Piruz had travelled to Britain from Holland only a few days earlier, though he'd already had time to assault a member of staff at Gatwick, only to be freed by magistrates. Piruz, a permanent Dutch resident who could travel under freedom of movement, was released from prison in Holland in 2014 after serving seven years of a 12 year sentence for decapitating his female tenant at a house near Amsterdam. He had apparently been inspired by Taliban beheading videos.

WTF?

While EU nationals arriving here are checked against watchlists of suspected terrorists and criminals compiled by the Border Agency, it seems that our EU "partners" have no obligation to alert us about convictions of murders or sex offences. Offenders have to be high profile, known to have committed a crime in several countries, or on the Interpol wanted list.

This is not an isolated case. Latvian builder Arnis Zalkains came into the UK in  2007 despite having served 7 years for killing his wife. Police here didn't know about that conviction when he was questioned about a sexual assault on a girl. He went on to murder 14 year old Alice Gross in 2014.

Now I rather doubt France, Germany or Spain want to have our pond life so you would have thought that tightening up on how people with criminal records are monitored and dealt with if they re-offend in another EU country would be a shared objective. I don't know whether Merkel and co think there are more important things than protecting their people, though you would expect them to think otherwise after the terrorist outrages in Berlin, Paris and Nice. We can but wonder if this is incomperence or the attachment of the Brussels bureaucrats to some kind of pure freedom of movement concept. Cameron doesn't really seem to have tried to tighten things up in his sham of a renegotiation before plunging his promising career over the edge and leaving no doubt as to what his legacy will be.

There is a practical issue for us in terms of post Brexit immigration controls which the more rabid parts of the press don't seem to have thought about. (Of course I read about these cases in the Mail, you don't think it was in the Guardian, do you?!) If other EU countries don't tell us now about these people, why will they in the future? What documentation and evidence will we require people wanting to come here to provide so we can weed out the undesirables? Will we be able to do it in practice?

And I can imagine the Guardianistas saying that, if someone has served their sentence, they should be free to come and work anywhere in their beloved single market. Well, to a point, yes. I agree with the concept of rehabilitation of offenders. But in the case of sex offenders we put them on a list, sometimes permanently. Surely processes can be designed which distinguish between common criminals and folk like the two egregious criminals above? Well it wouldn't surprise me if this issue had been firmly put in the too difficult tray by Cameron's government in which, of course, Teresa May was Home Secretary.

Or maybe, dazzled by the huge inflow of people, our politicians think that a small number of cases each year in hundreds of thousands is neither here nor there. Which leaves me feeling that they are just focussed on getting the number down rather than on letting in all the people we want and keeping out all of the ones we don't, which would seem to be a simple enough explanation of an objective that a majority could agree on.

Meanwhile Jamshid Piruz is on remand awaiting his trial. When he is eventually released, don't bet on our chances of sending him back whence he came to be very high given the abysmal record we have on this, given the data in my post The EU and Immigration (15 June 2016). These systems are broken and I don't know if the will or nous to fix them exists, in or out of the EU.