SIR Keir Starmer is right about one thing.
Our inability to deport illegals comes mainly from our own courts, not from the European Convention on Human Rights.
GettyPM Keir Starmer’s sloganising over Britain’s immigration mess won’t stop the boats[/caption]
ReutersOur inability to deport illegals comes mainly from our own courts[/caption]
But will he, of all people, tackle that problem? Will the lifelong human rights lawyer take on his old friends from Doughty Street, Matrix Chambers and the other firms that grew rich on the back of Tony Blair’s legal revolution? Of course not.
Starmer, like the rest of us, can see the problem. We have a set of judges who simply will not deport people.
Sometimes, the excuses they reach for are downright comical.
Your partner finds the Caribbean climate too hot? Stay as long as you like!
Your child doesn’t like the food in Albania? We couldn’t possibly have that!
Your transvestism would be frowned on in Algeria? Oh, you poor soul: Indefinite leave granted!
Country’s shame
Other countries manage to be in the ECHR without this problem.
Denmark, as fair and liberal a society as any leftie could want, run until recently by Stephen Kinnock’s wife, manages to boot criminals out.
But our immigration tribunals, as the Shadow Lord Chancellor Robert Jenrick keeps telling anyone who will listen, are staffed by human rights activists, often with long records of left-wing agitation, who seem determined to overturn every repatriation order.
The idea that they will change their ways simply because of a tweak in the guidelines on whether foreigners can avoid deportation because of poor prison or hospital conditions in their home countries is a fantasy.
To properly solve the issue, given the way our judges have taken to legislating from the bench, we would need to withdraw, not just from the ECHR, but from a series of other international treaties that are cited by our courts as reasons to stop the Home Office from removing illegal immigrants and criminals, including the UN Refugee Convention.
And even doing that would be only the start. A government that was serious about border control would also scrap a slew of Blair-era laws, including the Human Rights Act.
More controversially still, it would need to look at how to remove judges who rule on the basis of what they think the law ought to say rather than what it says.
The elevation of human rights has been the governing principle of his entire government
Dan
The idea that Starmer is the man to do these things is so absurd as to be hardly worth entertaining.
This is the man who told his biographer: “There is no version of my life that does not largely revolve around me being a human rights lawyer.”
It’s true. At every stage in his adulthood, as a Trotskyist student, a Centrist dad, a Corbyn yes-man or, now, a hapless PM, Starmer has always upheld the supremacy of human rights codes over national parliaments.
As Director of Public Prosecutions, supposedly a non-political role, he tore into Conservative plans to replace the Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights.
“It would be to this country’s shame if we lost the clear and basic statements of our citizens’ human rights provided by the Human Rights Act,” he declared in 2009.
The elevation of human rights has been the governing principle of his entire government.
It explains why he won’t drill for North Sea oil. It explains why he handed the British Indian Ocean Territory to a state that had never owned it.
PAStarmer must get a grasp of the expensive asylum hotel crisis[/caption]
AFPA government that was serious about border control would also scrap a slew of Blair-era laws, including the Human Rights Act[/caption]
His Attorney General, Lord Hermer, argues that to oppose the ECHR is to use the same arguments as the Nazis.
No, what we are seeing on the ECHR is what we see on immigration policy more widely. Rhetoric without the possibility of delivery.
Starmer’s sloganising will only make things worse
Dan
Sound and fury signifying nothing. Exactly what has driven British voters to despair of all their political leaders.
People sometimes imagine that it is easy to halt illegal entry, and that politicians secretly favour mass immigration.
This is untrue. Even if you assume that our leaders have the worst of motives, they still want to get re-elected.
Simple slogans
No, the problem is that, in order to take back control of our borders, we need fundamentally to reprogramme the state machine, to overhaul our judiciary and our civil service.
The Conservatives are at least looking into what needs to be done.
In June, Kemi Badenoch set up a commission under Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, which will report to the Conservative conference in two weeks.
But few voters are interested in process. Talk of structural reforms will always be trumped by simple slogans.
Send them back! Turn the boats around! Sack anyone who stands in the way!
If it were that easy, it would have happened by now. Unless the preparatory work has been done in earnest, there is no way of tackling the issue.
Politicians with clichés rather than plans is why we are in this mess.
Starmer’s sloganising will only make things worse.
Shutterstock EditorialThe idea that Starmer is the man for the job is so absurd as to be hardly worth entertaining[/caption] Published: [#item_custom_pubDate]
