Murdoch Turns On Blair
Posted May 3rd, 2006 by quarsan
Tony Blair was breathtaking in his cynical attempt to survive the foreign prisoner scandal.
He promised to deport every foreign prisoner after their sentence automatically. But there's not a chance that this will work.
It'll be ruled illegal by his own Human Rights Act.
The PM judged attack was the best form of attack. He accused the Tories of being just as bad when David Cameron was a Home Office adviser.
Mr Blair may have stomped through PMQs today but it was a performance of survival, not of strength.
Doomed. Doomed. Doomed.
"if you govern according to the headlines that you get, what I've learned over time is that you don't govern very consistently or well."
Tony Blair 3/12/05
Pascoe-Watson is clearly
Pascoe-Watson is clearly acting on orders there - the love affair looks over to me. Last time I read a Sun editorial it was urging us all to take those lovely ID cards to our hearts, so that makes a nice change.
So because they can't apply
So because they can't apply the existing law, the solution is to try and look even tougher than the BNP!
UKIP are saying that there is an recent EU directive that rules out deportation as part of a custodial punishment if I heard the radio correctly, but as that would imply that I listened to what UKIP had to say, it should be checked out further...
We don't need more bad law that the BNP would approve of - we need the existing law applying.
They really are a sick bunch of bastards, still, doubtless loyal Labour mp's will line up behind the pm when their services are required in the division lobby...
Aha. Hansard has that nice
Aha. Hansard has that nice Mr. McNulty from the Home Office, if we believe him:
Mr. McNulty: Council Directive 64/221/EEC provides that EU nationals may only be expelled from the UK on grounds of public policy, public security or public health. These provisions are reflected in regulations 21, 22 and 23 of the Immigration (European Economic Area) Regulations 2000 (as amended).
Regulation 26(3) provides that where a decision is taken to remove a person on one of these grounds then he is to be treated as if he were liable to deportation being a person to whom section 3(5) of the Immigration Act 1971 applied.
Directive 2004/38/EC will be transposed into UK legislation via the Immigration (European Economic Area) Regulations 2006, which are currently being drafted and will laid by negative resolution so as enter into force on 30 April 2006.
Chapter VI (Articles 27 to 33) of Directive 2004/38 concerns restrictions on the right of entry and residence of EU nationals on grounds of public policy, public security or public health. The Directive will continue to allow the UK to remove EEA nationals on the grounds of public policy, public security or public health.
The relevant parts of the
The relevant parts of the directive seem to go a bit further than Mr McNulty suggests.
Article 27, paras 1 and 2, reads
Measures taken on grounds of public policy or public security shall comply with the principle of proportionality and shall be based exclusively on the personal conduct of the individual concerned. Previous criminal convictions shall not in themselves constitute grounds for taking of such measures
The personal conduct of the individual concerned must represent a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat affecting one of the fundamental interests of society. Justifications that are isolated
from the particulars of the case or that rely on considerations of general prevention shall not be accepted.
and 28. 1 goes on to say
Before taking an expulsion decision on grounds of public policy or public security, the host Member State shall take account of considerations such as how long the individual concerned has resided on its territory, his/her age, state of health, family and economic situation, social and cultural integration into the host Member State and the extent of his/her links with the country of origin.
http://europa.eu.int/comm/justice_home/doc_centre/citizenship/movement/doc/table_correspondence_en.pdf
IANAL, but it looks to me as if this means the Home Secretary has to consider each potential deportation of an EU national on its merits and be able to justify it on the grounds of proportionality if he's asked to. It doesn't look as if he can just deport, on principle, all EU nationals who're imprisoned here.
GASP! You mean a Home Office
GASP!
You mean a Home Office Minister might not have been totally forthcoming with the truth in a Parliamentary answer? Imagine the scandal if that got out.
Actually, it looks like the Home Office does have the right to deport EU citizens (unlike what UKIP are claiming) but not an automatic right. If I'm reading it right, he can take previous convictions into account, but not deport *solely* because of them, he has to believe the person is an actual threat. I don't think it stops him deporting seriously violent criminals or sex offenders where you can argue there's a serious threat affecting the the fundamental interest of society not to be murdered or raped.
This strikes me as fair enough - I don't think it would be a particularly good thing if someone like my Dad who's lived in the UK for 56 years was kicked out because he threw a Wotsit out of a car or something.
I have a suspicion the 'Dangerous Foreigners Act' won't be anything like as stringent as Blair announced yesterday, for legal reasons. Check the Independent front page today, by the way. I might buy a copy on the way Not To Vote Labour at the church hall round the corner.
Tom, I read the restrictions
Tom, I read the restrictions on deporting EU nationals in the same way as do you, and agree they seem perfectly reasonable; all they really prevent is this blanket response of 'deport the lot of them'.
Quite what this Dangerous Foreigners Act (a super term, which I'm going to pinch, if you don't mind) achieves is beyond me. The Home Secretary doesn't need an Act of Parliament, it seems to me, to form the somewhat eccentric view that the continued presence here of any foreigner convicted of an imprisonable offence (such as travelling without a ticket on the railway and then giving a false name and address to the ticket inspector, for example) is not conducive to the public good.
He would, of course, need several Acts of Parliament to extricate himself from problems the Human Rights Act, the ECHR, the Single European Act and various conventions of the treatment of refugees that acting on his desire to deport all these folks will pose, but I suppose he'll cross that bridge when he comes to it.
Meanwhile, he's still stuck with the problem of what to do with people about whom there's already a presumption that they should be deported -- these bods he's been asked by judges to consider deporting but hasn't (and some of whom he's lost). As The Daily Telegraph points out, there's already a presumption that failed asylum seekers should be deported, too, but that's easier said than done, as the continued presence here of about a quarter of a million of them, much to the displeasure both of successive Home Secretaries and the red-tops, will testify.
There are, and will continue to be, convicted criminals like many of the ones Charles Clarke has recently misplaced, who, even though everyone would very much like to deport, we can't or won't, for perfectly good reasons, deport. No amount of legislation is going to change that. Seems to me the the Home Secretary (and let's hope it's a new one soon) would be far better engaged in working out what to do with that admittedly intractable problem -- possibly by asking his counterparts in other EU countries what they do, since whatever it is, they don't seem to make quite such a pig's ear of it -- than in introducing completely unnecessary and unworkable legislation to take his mind off things.