MPs have taken up the case of two young newlyweds who are being forced apart as an unintended consequence of a new immigration law aimed at protecting Asian women from forced marriages.

Adam Wallis and Canadian Rochelle Roberts, who married in the UK a week after her visa ran out, face an enforced year and a half of separation until she is 21…

Keith Vaz, the chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee, said last night the case could prompt a change in the law, adding: “This is clearly a case which needs to be looked at by a minister. What needs to happen is the government needs to say, ministers in the Home Office need to say, that this is not what we intended with this act…”

This is as stupid as the Zero Tolerance regulations much beloved of school administrators in the United States. Removing the requirement to think – removes responsibility for stupid decisions. Supposedly.

The couple met in Canada more than two years ago and remained in close contact before she decided to visit him at his home in Aberystwyth, Wales, last March.

They decided to marry and applied for permission from the Home Office a month before her visa ran out.

Arrangements for the wedding were delayed after the authorities lost the couple’s passport photos. Permission was finally granted a week before the visa ran out, but the couple were unable to arrange the wedding at such short notice.

By the time they married a few weeks later, and sent forms applying for Roberts to remain in the country, she had technically overstayed her visa…

Absolutely intolerable, of course, to the tiny minds and bureaucrats of the world.

The 18-month separation set to be imposed was described as an “inconvenience” in a letter from the UK Border Agency to the couple’s local MP, Mark Williams.

Though the brittle mindset of some nanny-state bureaucrats is a frequent concern of this blog – and many others – short-sighted decisions, thoughtless acts of inhumanity, criminal unwillingness to examine and make decisions based upon reality are as disgusting as any other aspect of a dissolute British government.

They surpass the American model. Which is really saying something.