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Chindamo - The Revenge Of Reid?

Posted August 22nd, 2007 by Tom

It's taken two days for some semblence of sanity to emergence from the tediously predictable tabloid-driven outrage over the Chindamo case.  No points at all go to the Tories who, recovering from the self-inflicted ruins of the Ealing Southall and NHS cuts campaigns, sought relief in the comfortable, familiar, traditional Conservative position of calling for the scrapping of a key part of Sir Winston Churchill's legacy.  The best coverage comes from the Times and Guardian, and even they omit certain details (the Times is mostly idiocy and only gets a mention for having the full ruling online, allowing us to skip the crap and read the document [DOC], which I suggest downloading and keeping in case it vanishes).  I wonder why none of the gentlemen of the press are giving us the whole story here.  Could it be this section of the ruling?:

In particular he referred to the memo from Ms Radford, the Governor of HM Prison Ford, dated 25 April  2006, to be found at pages 63 and 64 of Mr Scannell’s bundle.  Among others things she referred to the fact that on day release in February  2006 the appellant had been pursued by members of the press and an article appeared in the Sun newspaper three days later.  There were further follow-up articles in the Sun, the  Daily Express and the Brighton Argus. Ms Radford expressed her deep concern that they were ‘managing offenders by media’ and spending more time playing down risk than explaining their offender management strategies and how those more effectively protected the public than hysterical misinformed articles in the gutter press.

Indeed, it turns out that the tabloids, far from representing the outrage of the Man in the Street to an aloof and out of touch judiciary, are at the heart of the legal argument.  The Home Office deportation letter of October 2006 (given the timings, this is the not-fit-for-purpose Reid Home Office in the months following the prisoner deportation scandal, so outlandish incompetence can be assumed) is based on the entirely ludicrous grounds that despite all the authorities agreeing that the chances of Chindamo re-offending are particularly low and that he's a model rehabilitation case, the assumption should be that the inevitable tabloid hounding will drive him back to committing crimes so serious that he will be a risk to public security.  Take a moment to drink that one in - the Government is essentially claiming the press are inevitable going to incite a man to commit a crime and there's nothing they can do.  No 'early intervention' for Murdoch and Wade's problem family, then.

This argument is quite bizarre, and it's not entirely surprising that the deportation was appealed.  What actually happened was quite interesting - the Tribunal accepted that the easiest possible test should be applied ('grounds of public policy, public security or public health'), and then concluded that the risk of being pursued into crime by tabloid rats didn't come close to satisfying this.  Also, although most sensible types have spotted the Immigration (European Economic Area) Regulations 2006 as being key to this, there's an earlier Directive, No. 64/221, which is also relevant, as it states that the conduct of the appellant is what matters.  That's the appellant, not the media, and that's the key to the matter.

Good bloggage on this:
Chicken Yoghurt
Blood & Treasure
Ministry of Truth
Obsolete, pointing out how completely wrong all the early commentary was on this.
Tim Worstall, giving the Stupid Party a D-, Must Try Harder