First post in my new online blogging home, having finally got the TP archive shifted over, and what better way to start that by giving the Safety Elephant's compendious trunk a bit of a tweak and laying down a prediction.
No, not about the date that Charles Clarke makes his exit from the Home Office; for despite his piss-poor argument for staying in post - 'I've fucked up, so I'll fix it!' - I can give you a much better argument for his not resigning in mere four words…
Hazel Blears - Home Secretary.
Fair make you shudder at the mere thought of it, doesn't it? Although maybe not so much as the idea of John Prescott getting laid.
But never fear, Safety (or Cuddles as he's become known to Indy columnist Simon Carr) has the answer! Let's change the law - stop me if you've heard all this before.
Yes, there's no end of ingenuity of government when it comes to finding excuses for passing yet more unnecessary and illiberal legislation - given the right circumstances, even their own administrative incompetence can become a pretext for even more draconian legislation…
…and it's this that sees me cracking the ox bones and examining the entrails to come up with a set of predictions as to what will happen as a result of Safety's efforts to get him and his department out of the shit.
Prediction 1.
The government will introduce new provisions which will make the deportation of foreign criminals automatic on completion of their sentence. This will most likely be done via a set of late amendments to the Police and Justice Bill , which is currently before Parliament.
Prediction 2.
The government will claim, on introducing these provisions, that they are compatible with ECHR and the Human Rights Act.
It takes no real predictive genius to come up with these first two predictions - the government is currently getting slaughtered in the press on this issue and will feel the need to be seen to be doing something about it.
It has two basic options open to it in response to this issue:
a. Pass new legislation - this is relatively quick to do and offers a highly visible response for the press to report on, which means it looks like its doing something straight away.
or
b. Sort of the mess in the Home Office - this will take time and many/most of the changes and (hopefully) improvements will take a long time to surface and become apparent, which means that it won't generate many headlines, short of a high profile sacking or two, and won't look as good.
Now in Safety's position, which would you take, if you're prime motivation is to hang on to your job?
However, the predictions don't stop there, as if this is followed through and the proposed changes in law are passed, we get to…
Prediction 3.
Any new law that makes the deportation of foreign criminals automatic will be subject to a legal challenge in the High Court no soon as the government makes its first attempt to put it into practice.
Prediction 4.
This will result in yet another highly embarrassing court case for the Home Office, at the end of which the new law will be found to be incompatible with the Human Rights Act.
There are fundamental legal problems with this idea that foreign criminals may be deported automatically at the end of their sentence.
First, as numerous cases have shown over the years, the courts tend to take a dim view of 'automatic anything' when it comes to what amounts to a judicial decision - it is a longstanding principle in British law (natural justice), which long predates the Human Rights Act, that individual cases should be dealt with on their merits, a position backed up by article 6 of ECHR which guarantees the right to a fair trial, a principle which applies not only to courts but to a wide range of other quasi-judicial tribunals and decision-making processes.
Any law which arbitrarily imposes as sentence or sanction, such as deportation, without due consideration of the individual facts and merits of a specific case stands a very good chance of being overruled by the High Court.
This leads nicely on to the second major problem with Safety's proposals - in certain circumstances it may be unlawful to deport a foreign criminal on release from a prison sentence irrespective of the severity of the offence for which they were convicted in the UK.
When it comes to deportations, an overriding principle of international and European law is that an individual cannot be deported to a country where such a deportation would put their life at risk or put them at risk of persecution, torture, etc. Case will undoubtedly arise out of these proposed changes to the law in which it is simply not possible to deport a foreign criminal to a place where they will be safe (in legal terms) from persecution - this is crux of the matter with today's reports regarding the Somalian national being sought in relation to the murder of PC Sharon Beshenivsky, as John Reid has noted today:
The Defence Secretary, John Reid, today told GMTV Mr Jamma's deportation had been rejected because it would have been impossible to return him to Somalia, which is in a state of civil chaos.
"There was a threat that if [he] took a plane into the capital, Mogadishu, not only would he have been blown out of the air but the pilot of the plane would have been," he said. "So it was decided, on balance, they should not deport him in this case."
There will be cases in which it will not be possible to deport foreign criminals because it is both unsafe to return them to their country of origin and impossible to find any other country willing to take them - lets face it, if you were responsible for immigration in another country would you take people being deported from the UK as criminals.
In the case of foreign nationals who have a legitimate claim to asylum in the UK and who then go on to commit criminal offence, even a serious one, the government is in a bind - it cannot simply deport them at the end of their sentence if it cannot find a safe place to send them.
This leads on to my final prediction:
Prediction 5.
No soon as the idea of automatically and arbitrarily deporting foreign criminal is ruled incompatible with ECHR/Human Right Acts, the home Secretary of the day, whoever it might be by then, will announce more new measures to deal with foreign criminals.
Assuming that they haven't also been ruled unlawful by the courts by then, this will amount to the extension of the use of control orders (i.e. House Arrest) to new classes of offender, over and above the 'terrorist suspects' who are currently subject to those orders - I think we can safely expect that such an extension will encompass both violent offenders and sex offenders. This, we will be told, will be for our own safety and to protect the public from the possibility of these criminals re-offending.
And the important thing to remember is all this is that control orders can be applied to both foreign nationals and UK citizens - they were introduced, after all, after the High Court ruled that the previous system that resulted in foreign terrorist suspects being interned indefinitely in Belmarsh Prison was incompatible with ECHR on, amongst other things, grounds of discrimination.
No doubt as this scenario unfolds, we'll be treated to all the usual hand-wringing sophistry about 'the rights of victims' while, all the time, the political rhetoric will slowly but surely reinforce the idea that this kind of thing will only affect people who aren't like us - we've seen this constantly over the last five years in the cynical use of the terrorist bogeyman to sell the public on ever more illiberal and draconian legislation; they're 'terrorists' and not like us so we've nothing to fear from things like control orders, extended powers of detention without charge, arbitrary stop and search powers and a whole raft of other overtly controlling legislation…
…And yet every single one of these pieces of legislation does apply to us, all of us, and could be used (and abused) against ordinary law-abiding British Citizens - some of it (stop and search) already is used in this way, as octagenarians John Catt and Walter Wolfgang found at last year's Labour Party conference.
Scary huh?
