Deliberate cruelty and injustice

And this is just the start. There’s an old saying that the UK has an ‘elected dictatorship’, where there is little to restrain the government between elections.[1]

The Brexit Party (AKA Tories) is – well, not actually ‘fascist’ yet, but clearly ‘fascist curious’. They got an overwhelming majority with a minority of the votes, and are taking steps to consolidate power (reducing the power of the judiciary and House of Lords).
It looks like they are going to gerrymander the districts, which might mean that 35% of the vote would keep them in power.

The press is largely pro-fascist. Limitations due to EU membership are gone, and the problems caused by Brexit can be used to promote fascism.

It’s going to really, really s*ck for most of the people in the UK.

[1] There is the fabled ‘unwritten British Constitution’, the thing which recently proven to be worth the paper it is (not) written on.

Yeah what Barry said. The UK press is essentially pro-fascist, and has been for most of my lifetime. I’m still amazed that people seriously propose that the Russians had anything to do with Brexit, and ignore the 40 year campaign of media propaganda and bullshit against the EU. The media created much of the racist landscape that we inhabit. The media certainly helped the Tories win the last election.

Everyone who works at the Times, the Telegraph, the Mail,etc should be treated as the racist and fascist enablers that they are. I’m fed up with seeing crocodile tears from journalists who work for these rags. Or their shock that the Tories they helped win are ‘racist’, or ‘undemocratic’, or that Boris Johnson is a racist chancer who will say anything to get elected.

And that should extend to the BBC as well – whose role tends to be laundering racist/sexist/fascist drivel from the newspapers and presenting it to a mass audience. Because it’s part of the discourse. The media are the enemy. Much of it needs to be destroyed.

The last election destroyed any tolerance I had for any of it. Most of the UK media just needs to die.

The Home Office, ICE in the US, Home Affairs in Australia are all on the same plane as far as performative cruelty goes. Is this an anglosphere thing, or go Germany or France dump long-standing residents abroad too?

In Australia, this has seen high-level pushback from NZ (a major destination). How does the UK handle the reverse – where some non -English speaking UK-born person is rudely decanted at Heathrow? Or do they insist that the traffic is all one way?

“Citation please”
Crock and Berg, _Immigration Refugees, and Forced Migration: Law Policy and Practice in Australia_, chapter 3, and chapter 17. Really, though, I teach Australian migration law, and am not just making this up. You’re “citation please” shtick gets a bit old after a while, in the age of google. It’s not others jobs to do your homework.

Also, yes, I meant to write “justiciable” – a rule that can be plausibly applied by a court or administrative body. In discussions on immigration policy, people often come up with policies that are not very plausibly justiciable, and this is a problem. But, this approach was used in the past, and can be made sufficiently rule-like to be applied now, and would help avoid many of the problems Chris mentions. But thanks for the helpful contribution here!

Childbirth needs to be less dangerous, nicotine needs to be less addictive, Donald Trump needs to be less dishonest, and I’ve been told they need to do something about the Heathrow baggage retrieval system.

JD – it would be fairly easy to clamp down on the UK media. Change ownership laws so that you can only own a single newspaper, have to be paying taxes and resident in the UK. Then strengthen the public’s ability to get compensation from the tabloids. I know of two people who had their lives destroyed by the Daily Mail. Many more have had their lives destroyed by the Sun, and in recent years the Times.

I have just watched an election where most of the UK Press operated as the unofficial propaganda wing of the Tory party. It’s always been bad in my lifetime, but in recent years it has become ridiculous. The Times regularly pumps out racist trash, the Daily Mail is still the fascist supporting rag it was in the 1930s and the Sun published a neofascist conspiracy theory during the election. It’s no coincidence that the people in the UK who are mostly like to read newspapers are also the most likely to hold reactionary and racist views.

Most countries do not have a media like the UK. God knows the media in the US is crappy, but compared to the UK it actually seems okay. People need to call out the media for the role it plays, and shame journalists for their part in it. Working for the Times, the Telegraph, or the Mail should be as seen as like working for Der Stürmer.

Matt

Crock and Berg, _Immigration Refugees, and Forced Migration: Law Policy and Practice in Australia_, chapter 3, and chapter 17.

Thank you. I can’t look at it right now because it’s out on loan. I don’t suppose by any chance that you’re the borrower?

Really, though, I teach Australian migration law

Is that supposed to be something I was already aware of? I don’t know how I could have been. Now that I do know, I regard what you’re telling me differently, but I didn’t know it when I composed my earlier comment.

Now that I know that, it also seems to me that you’d probably be able to cite a few relevant leading cases, which I could easily look up online if only I knew what they were.

and am not just making this up.

The possibility that you might be making it up never occurred to me.

I’ve had plenty of experience of people telling me things which they weren’t making up, things which they’d been told by other people, sometimes repeatedly, and then finding out that the information was inaccurate. I have myself repeated to other people things which I’ve been told by people who I assumed knew what they were talking about and then discovered, on checking, that the information was inaccurate. I’ve more than once had the experience of discovering that people were in possession of the same information that I was but were misinterpreting it.

You’re “citation please” shtick gets a bit old after a while

Whether you respond is entirely up to you. I am grateful that you chose to, but it does seem a little odd that you should first supply an answer and then gripe about having been asked.

in the age of google. It’s not others jobs to do your homework.

But which search terms am I supposed to use? I tried ‘Australia citizenship law’ and ‘Australia citizenship law history’, but those searches did not produce results which let me check your information (although interesting in other ways). They didn’t, for example, produce a citation of Crock and Berg, which you were able to do easily.

Also, yes, I meant to write “justiciable” – a rule that can be plausibly applied by a court or administrative body.

I did think you might have meant that (which is why I suggested it). Before I knew that you taught law, I had no reason to think it was a word you would have known.

The question of deportation of foreign nationals has been covered fairly recently by a document in the House of Commons Library “Deportation of Foreign National Offenders”. (link not available but it is discussed here).

The document states “The UK Borders Act 2007 made provision for the automatic deportation of foreign criminals. The Home Secretary must make a deportation order in respect of a foreign criminal unless certain exceptions apply”. And section 6 tells us that in 2018/19 5,322 foreign criminals were deported of whom 3,633 were EU nationals and 1,689 were non EU citizens.

It is easy to criticise from the comfort of your armchair, but if you, as a Home Secretary, intervene to prevent foreign nationals from being deported when the normal legal process would have resulted in them being deported, and one of them then commits a serious crime (which given rates of recidivism is quite likely), then that’s your career finished.

The problematic issue here, as with Windrush deportations, is that a significant number of people who came over from the Caribbean in the second half of last century do not have their citizenship fully in order. At that time, when the UK had close links to Commonwealth countries and had a stable population of 56 million, that did not matter much. Now, when the UK through EU membership gave right of residence to 500 million people, and our population is 67 million and climbing, citizenship matters a lot.

If I were Home Secretary, I would not intervene. I would be quite happy for the courts to intervene, and I would be quite happy for Parliament to ask me to properly sort out citizenship of long standing UK residents of Caribbean origin. But to initiate action to prevent an automatic process from occurring with the almost certain consequence of one of those allowed to remain committing a serious criminal offence would be, in the words of Sir Humphrey, a brave thing to do.

J-D: “citation please” is calling someone a liar-or-idiot. That’s what you did, and if you were right in doing so you would have been right to do so.

But you weren’t, and that means you were rude and offensive. Offense can happen in error: if in light of your new knowledge you walk your statements back then in learning from your mistakes you get reborn. If you don’t…. to leave an offense deliberately uncorrected is to deliberately offend, no?

There’s a word for people who say false and hurtful things in knowledge of their falsity. This word describes you as you are: what are you goinv to do about it?

JD:
1) GFY.
2) It’s rich to see somebody asking me for a citation for somebody else’s statement.

I don’t know of any country where there’s much more to restrain a government between elections than there is much more to restrain the government between elections than there is in the UK (a little more, maybe, but not much more).

The UK doesn’t have an entrenched constitution which can be enforced against Parliament against its will, unlike most countries, so this seems manifestly false.

Consider, for example, that the UK has been in contravention of the rights of prisoners to vote for 15 years now, and has basically just ignored the rulings and carried on like they didn’t happen.

CB@13: the precedent for deportation (and indeed, deprivation of citizenxhip) of serious criminals goes back far further than its use against what you euphemistically call “people of Pakistani origin involved in grooming gangs in the north of England”. Muslim men, mostly Pakistani in origin, have indeed been deported for the extended sexual abuse of rather a large number of under-age girls, in the north, and more recently convicted if not yet deported from the south of England. I trust you find that acceptable.

But consider the case (I’m not sure that it set a precedent, there may well be earlier cases) of Klaus Fuchs, a naturalised refugee from Nazi Germany and a very talented physicist, who made a significant contribution to the development of nuclear weapons, but passed on all he knew to Stalin’s USSR: convicted in the UK of espionage (under the Attlee government which I would hesitate to call fascist) he was imprisoned, stripped of his British citizenship and eventually deported to East Germany.

I’m not sure where one should place the borders of “serious crime”. Your opinion?

Like Daragh McDowell @21, I appreciate Chris Bertram’s consistent and informed focus on these issues (and also Matt’s contributions).

I don’t have anything to add about immigration policy, but I’d like to make a comment about “unwritten” constitutions, a subject that’s come up a couple of times in this thread.

Whether a constitution is written or unwritten (or perhaps put more accurately, codified or uncodified in a single document) is, in my view, generally less important than a political system’s underlying norms, practices, and conventions, which are mostly by definition unwritten, and also the strength and independence of the judiciary. Polities can have written constitutions full of specific rights and guarantees that are ignored, and weak or subservient courts that are ineffective in enforcing them. On the other hand, a so-called unwritten constitution whose norms are both longstanding and generally respected can be appealed to effectively when those norms are breached. I’m sure someone more intimately conversant with the details of modern British political history than I am could come up with examples of the unwritten constitution having a constraining effect, maybe not as often as it might have or maybe less in recent years, but I have little doubt that the historical examples are there. And of course, the “unwritten” British constitution is comprised partly of written documents, such as the 1689 Bill of Rights and other acts of Parliament.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689

Moreover, there are certain drawbacks to a polity’s being tied to a single codified constitution, as anyone somewhat familiar with e.g. the U.S. Constitution and the history of its interpretation can attest. Many Americans are taught to think of the U.S. Constitution as a quasi-sacred document which, despite its merits especially after the Reconstruction Amendments, it is far from being. The recent Trump impeachment trial highlighted yet again how vague and open to conflicting interpretations some of the key provisions of the Constitution, in this case the impeachment clause, are. To be sure, some interpretations are better than others (I thought Alan Dershowitz’s views as set out in his presentation to the Senate during the impeachment trial were quite absurd despite the patina of pseudo-historical “scholarship”), but that’s a separate point.

I’m liking Dipper’s contribution here, in particular this:

a significant number of people who came over from the Caribbean in the second half of last century do not have their citizenship fully in order

This is splendid. The use of the phrase “fully in order” is a really nice piece of low-key fascism. Tell me Dipper, do you have your papers in order? Does the phrase “are your papers in order” mean anything to you?

Because if you don’t have a passport it is actually quite difficult to prove your citizenship in the UK, as Chris alludes to in the OP and as you (as always) fail to understand from your position of white cluelessness. I bet you don’t have the first clue what is required to prove you are a citizen, and how much of that proof depends on having parents who have their papers in order, or even grandparents with the right proof. I’m sure you could have taken the time in your life to find out what it involves, but you haven’t, have you? You really don’t have a clue. You’ve been voting to produce this system of cruelty and exclusion for the past 50 years, but you don’t have a clue about how it works or what it does – and sneer at people when they point out that it is mean. I think you’d be surprised, if the system decided to demand proof of citizenship from you and your mates, at how many of you have no proof at all of your citizenship and are unable to get your papers in order. But you are confident the system won’t ask you, because you’re white. And you’re incapable of imagining what is actually involved.

Another nice example of this is “I’m happy for the courts to sort it out.” The courts put a hold on this flight but it took off anyway. But you don’t care because it’s not happening to you, or to anyone white.

Even holding the government to its own PR about the people on the flight – that they had all been guilty of ‘serious crimes’ – would be a start. They had not. One of them got a 2-month sentence which a later judge said was OTT for the offence.

Another on the flight was a soldier with rampant PTSD, done for GBH and who had received zero aftercare after a couple of wretched tours.

I’d personally LOVE to see a Home Secretary resign for recidivism by rapists let out of prison early due to over-crowding, or whose prosecution is delayed beyond the point of reasonable success by the under-funded court system. Read the Secret Barrister if you have any doubts about the number of lives being destroyed by this government. Resignations there are zero.

This flight was a stain on Britain and clear marker of the corrosion of rule of law. I’ve seen no purer example of the right’s use of the state to punish, not support, the powerless, and to only uphold and never hold responsible those with power. (Corbyn’s PMQ on Johnson’s foreign birth, cocaine use and conspiracy to commit crime was brutally correct.) FaustusNotes is right about the chilling ‘papers, please’ response of those who assume the state will never turn on them.

Yes, as Chris notes, implicit in a defense of this principle of deporting British citizens with dual citizenship is the division of citizens into two classes. Also there is the very shabby practice of dumping our criminals onto countries who never, in practice, had any responsibility for the personal development of those individuals. The implicit attribution of criminality to the racial background of those people is obvious.

Dipper, you might like to think about how easy that own goal is to score. In my case, for example, I am a British citizen by parentage, but born in NZ and with parents living in other countries, while I live in Japan. I am fortunate enough to have possession of my NZ birth certificate, and I have had a UK passport since my childhood. In my 20s I allowed that passport to expire and then threw it away. When the time came to renew my passport I had no evidence I ever had one and the consulate in Japan refused to believe I ever had one. I essentially had to prove my citizenship over again, without any documentation. I argued with multiple staff at the consulate until one finally saw sense and allowed me to submit an application, at which point someone somewhere in the UK must have found a record for me. Given their recent behavior (e.g. asking a 101 year old man to get proof from his parents), and particularly given the chaotic nature of record keeping in many countries and many families, this “papers in order” stuff is super risky. You would be surprised how many people living in your country have basically no evidence of their citizenship rights and are completely dependent upon the government having suitable records (and a good faith approach to disputes) in order to protect those rights. Once you’ve lived overseas – or if you come from relatively mixed families – you begin to get a sense of what that means. Otherwise, you remain clueless to these risks.

Another example (not British) is my eligibility for Spanish citizenship. After Brexit I investigated, and since my grandfather was spanish I think I’m eligible if I live there for a year. But how do I prove my grandfather was spanish? He fled Spain after the Fascist victory with only his clothes, a rifle and a stone from his hometown, spent a year in a camp in France and joined the Foreign Legion. Where are his documents? What should I do? It would be easier for me to get Japanese citizenship than to find any evidence of my Spanish rights. No doubt a lot of older migrants to the UK are in that position, and you and your Brexit ilk show zero respect for that.

In fact I bet if my grandfather were still alive the UK govt would be demanding proof of citizenship and threatening to deport a man who fought for the British army against the Nazis for 5 years, and contributed to the growth of post-war Britain with every bone and sinew. But to you he’s just a second class citizen who should have his “papers in order”.

I wonder how long it will be before other “other” countries follow Bangladesh in saying “not here, not them”, and specifically I wonder whether it might be possible to pass a law saying “if someone with dual citizenship is convicted of a crime in another country their citizenship here is automatically forfeit”. Would be problematic for countries like Australia that have birthright citizenship.

Specifically, I can’t see Australia accepting that, even from a country as near and dear as Aotearoa/New Zealand, let alone some racially-inferior(sic) dumping ground like PNG.

An interesting point is that the current governments of the US, Australia and the UK are not only cruel but incompetent. Trump loses in any court the Republicans have not packed, and sometimes in those they have, records are lost or not kept, differing and contradictory explanations offered, people are sacked or leave. The PM of Australia first denies he is on holiday despite photos, offers spin so feeble that it has to be replaced a day or two later and has no program at all, Johnson has lost his chancellor within months of election. Cruelty is about all they have.

Give evidence against instead of asking for evidence for, or something.

If somebody tells me that in Bermuda mirrors are known as leaks, what could I conceivably produce as evidence against? Wouldn’t it make more sense to request substantiation? I could of course use ‘Bermuda’, ‘mirror’, and ‘leak’ as search terms in DuckDuckGo, but I’ve just tried that and the search does not return hits for Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Breakfast Of Champions (in which the character of Kilgore Trout tells people that where he comes from people refer to mirrors as leaks, and when asked where he comes from replies ‘Bermuda’).

If somebody tells me that in Bermuda mirrors are known as leaks, what could I conceivably produce as evidence against?

Why do you need to produce evidence?
Why do you doubt, anyway? [if you have a reason then that reason is evidence, no? If you have no evidence against you have no reason to doubt]

[hrm. You’re treating the hypothetical as false even while you’re analysing it, I think. Because you know it’s false real-world, but that’s not what you’re supposed to pay attention to. To learn something from a hypothetical you have to pretend it’s true.]

Can I encourage you to drop this and just think about it rather than asking for clarification and pushing back against me to see if I’ve made any errors? I’ve already spent a couple of hours on this, and I really can’t prioritise giving you any more time for the foreseeable.

@39

Oh no, not a law that might inconvenience the Guardian, maybe to the extent that the Guardian (or, better still, the Observer) might have to shut down, that would be awful, how would we all survive.

Why do you need to produce evidence?

I don’t, but it was your suggestion.

Why do you doubt, anyway?

I am prepared to be proved wrong, but I would hazard the guess that my reasons for doubting it to be true that mirrors are referred to as leaks in Bermuda are similar to your own reasons for doubting it, but just as difficulty to articulate briefly.

Can I encourage you to drop this and just think about it rather than asking for clarification and pushing back against me to see if I’ve made any errors?

I have thought about it. My comments reflect my thoughts.

I’ve already spent a couple of hours on this, and I really can’t prioritise giving you any more time for the foreseeable.

If you respond to me, it’s by your own choice. You can always choose not to.

It is sadly true that deporting so-called criminal foreigners is a vote-winner for the fascists. Although not a huge one, but very effective to fire up the fascist base, as Trump has proven.

Those who are interested in this issue might want to look into the recent development in Switzerland https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidgenössische_Volksinitiative_«Für_die_Ausschaffung_krimineller_Ausländer_(Ausschaffungsinitiative)»

I‘m sure there is some literature in English (certainly in French) but you’ll have to look for the references yourself.

Briefly, there were two votes. In the First, the Extreme Right won narrowly, 53 to 47 (a Brexit majority). Parliament then had to implement the „will of the people“ but in a manner consistent with basic human rights guarantees. The Right then smelled another chance to push the discourse. That time they lost, 41 to 59.

Re the question whether Anglo countries are worse than others – probably not but do some research internationally if you can, I think it’s worthwhile.

@ TM “It is sadly true that deporting so-called criminal foreigners is a vote-winner for the fascists. “. This is such a classic CT comment. Virtue in powerlessness.

In the unlikely event of people here getting actual responsibility, you will be faced many times with a 2×2 matrix. You have a problem. There is a standard solution S. Or you can be brave, stand up for decency, make the world a better place, and make the bold decision B. And your actions can succeed or fail. CTers like to say how good the world would be if decision B is implemented and it succeeds. but when you have actual responsibility, that is not the box in the 2×2 grid that keeps you awake at night. The insomnia box is B and fail.

So fine, choose decency over fascism, go ahead and intervene and stop those deportations. But when this guy reoffends, how are you going to explain your decision to the victim and their family?

Dipper

Law and justice is not a simple matrix. There is judgement involved. People who have been resident in Australia all their lives from infancy, who speak nothing but English, have no connections with their birth country, have been dumped in Serbia or Croatia. Those responsible plead that the law mandates this – but then they wrote the law.

In some cases these people are continuing petty criminals, who will fairly surely continue to be a burden to society. But it is hard to see why they should be a burden to Croatia rather than Australia, or why the processes that apply to Australians should not apply to them (as also in the case you cite – are there no ways of dealing with determined native recidivists?). Or are you happy to see your country and mine dump the social rubbish over the fence – and no doubt whine when the neighbours retaliate?

@Dipper: how does deporting the guy make it less likely that he will reoffend?

Dipper @ 46 and 47

Congratulations – of all the asinine, ignorant, and short-sighted things you have said, this is perhaps the most egregious.

Let´s go through your statements together. I don´t expect you´ll learn anything – heaven knows you´ve repeatedly shown that to be a false hope – but just as a matter of record (though I expect others will also chime in with commentary superior to my own relatively small effort).

“In the unlikely event of people here getting actual responsibility”

While this is a fairly minor point, it is rather telling that Dipper assumes no-one on CT has ever had “actual responsibility”. Not the internationally recognised professors who are expected to juggle research, teaching, and mentoring with administration, budgeting, applying for funding, and advising the global community. Not those CTs who have been in the army, or have started their own companies. Not those who advise government on policy, or promulgate the direction their companies have to take to keep afloat. Nope, none of those things count as experiencing “actual responsibility” in Dipper´s mind.

I mean even I (hardly the most experienced member of CT) was – for 3 years – responsible, ethically and legally, for the ongoing well-being of ca. 100 people in a research institute, and now currently oversee my own team of about 10 people in an internationally recognised institue which regularly advises companies regarding product development and governments on energy policy. Perhaps you don´t consider that that quite lives up to being a 2nd hand car dealer in Chipping Norton (or whatever your personal apogee of “actual responsibility” is) but I think most of us have enough of an idea to understand the concept without requiring your condescending and, frankly speaking, childishly simplistic comment.

Moving on:

”So fine, choose decency over fascism, go ahead and intervene and stop those deportations.”

It is nice to see you finally admitting that you would choose fascism over decency – an unexpected moment of honesty from you.

“But when this guy reoffends, how are you going to explain your decision to the victim and their family?”

Well, unlike you I don´t slap a label on a whole segment of people and assume they are all identical. For example, I don´t assume that every victim of rape is going to feel the same way about their attacker. Some may be fine with the idea of someone being pardoned after serving their term, others may not. So, in the unlikely event of your scenario occurring, first of all I´d see what the victim´s opinion is, rather than – as you obviously do – assuming every person has the same perspective as you.

It is interesting that you make the implicit assumption that everyone who has committed a crime will reoffend. It is certainly an insight into Dipper´s understanding of the world. But why stop here? Let´s extend it still further – if someone has committed a speeding offense, how do we justify not locking them up indefinitely? After all, they might speed again, and then hit someone and kill them. Well, actually the resolution is fairly easy – typically we punish people for crimes they have committed, not crimes that we think they might potentially commit at some unspecified point in the future. Clearly you think this is a problem with the system – I wonder if you realise Minority Report was not a documentary?

If, on the other hand, you object to someone “clearly dangerous” (however we are supposed to assess that perfectly every time) being released, your objection is to the way our justice system assesses and releases offenders, and not to the actual debate we are having here regarding deportation.

Of course, it is also rather telling that – rather than discussing any of the people the OP or anyone else is discussing – you turn to a different case, with different circumstances, in order to try and make your point. It is something of a habit of yours.

It is also interesting that you, like many others making the same arguments as you, focus on the “worst case”. It would be nice if you also considered that some of the people targeted for deportation have served their sentences and not committed any crimes since – but clearly you don´t feel that that is a mitigating factor.

Even given all this, you still fail to make the argument that someone who has served their time should be still considered a menace to society and deported (inadvertently reinforcing the point Chris Bertram made about “dumping our problems on other, poorer countries”).

But, just for now, let´s be very generous – let´s ignore all the objections which can or will be made against your comments: let´s assume it is fine for the government to ignore legal challenges on a whim; that no mistakes ever happen regarding sentencing individuals, and that no-one is ever innocent, or has been confused with someone else due to a paperwork error; let´s also assume that it is fine to deport someone who has served a sentence for committing a crime, even if they have lived many years afterwards without ever any propensity for reoffending; let´s assume that it is fine to ignore our responsibilities towards people, and deport them regardless of what may happen afterwards; let´s also assume that there could be no repercussions from deporting someone to a country they haven´t been to since they were a child, have no ties to, don´t speak the language, and have even less chances for pursuing an honest life than they would in the UK; let´s assume that everyone who has ever committed a crime will always reoffend, and that if anyone reoffends it is due to some innate moral failing and not because of any systematic problems, and thus they have lost any right to pursue a normal life after serving their time; moreover, let´s assume that tearing someone away from their family in the UK will not impact that family in any way (even if they have a partner, and a young child who has suddenly lost a parent).

Let´s grant, for the sake of your argument, all of these things and more.

If someone has lived in the UK for the majority of their life and been raised under a UK system, has then committed a crime in the UK, been sentenced under UK law, and served that sentence, how do you justify subsequently making them “someone else´s problem”? For all of your comments regarding “actual responsibility”, you seem curiously keen to abrogate it as soon as you possibly can.

I don´t particularly expect you to address any of the points made here, but it would be nice if you at least considered the possibility that allowing the home office to pick and choose who it deports is somewhat unhealthy, as it then reinforces the idea that the law may be ignored whenever politically convenient. Is that really something you want to encourage?

(No need to answer the rhetorical question – you´ve already made your position quite clear with respect to expecting the Tory party to be bound by rules or convention).

@ Jim Buck. “have you not twigged that the Harlow attacker is not from our former colony, wasn’t brought here as a child, etc?” above I state that the ‘Windrush generation’ should have their UK citizenship confirmed so they don’t get deported.

@ notGoodenough “though I expect others will also chime in with commentary superior to my own relatively small effort” oh don’t put yourself down “2nd hand car dealer in Chipping Norton” I wish “but it would be nice if you at least considered the possibility that allowing the home office to pick and choose who it deports is somewhat unhealthy” that is exactly my point as I stated above, and why this stuff should be done by courts. The notion that a Home Secretary is going to plough through 5,000 foreign prisoner releases and decide on a whim whether each person is going to stay or not is ridiculous for the reason you state. What is being asked in the OP is for the Home Secretary to pick and choose.

“It is interesting that you make the implicit assumption that everyone who has committed a crime will reoffend.” I didn’t. But recidivism states are quite high, so in a large sample of released offenders, some of them will re-offend. And that comes back to the HS.

And the OP is not about releasing prisoners per se, it is about deporting criminals who have indeterminate citizenship.

@ faustusnotes If you deport someone to another country and they rape someone there, is it less of a crime because it affected a foreign woman? “. Objectively no, but the Home Secretary’s job is looking after the UK population, in which case telling a rape victim that someone was going to get raped, so might just as well be you as someone in the offender’s home country, doesn’t strike me as being the kind of response likely to result in you staying in the job longer than the time taken to retweet on Twitter.

“when this guy reoffends, how are you going to explain your decision to the victim and their family? If that statement is about a British citizen, what is your solution?”

This is obviously not an uncommon occurrence. The usual response is to say these things are handled by the courts and through the parole board. The obvious problem is that if each sentence and release decision was left up to the (any) Home Secretary no-one would ever get out. And as a society should look to rehabilitate offenders then a process which allows release and rehabilitation without the Home Secretary being on the hook for every subsequent crime is a good thing.

@ J-D “Why should it be that choosing B and failing causes nightmares, but choosing S and failing does not cause nightmares? When you have actual responsibility, Dipper, which do you do? Do you decide to be brave, stand up for decency, and make the world a better place; or not?”. It depends. A single S-fail should not get you fired as you are implementing the ready-made solution you have inherited. Repeated S-fail will get you fired as it is your job to look out for such things and change them. So, my view is you need to choose your moments. If I was Home Secretary I’d be asking some civil servants in the Home Office why despite assurances this issue of Windrush citizenship was still landing on my desk and getting me in the papers.

Rules are there to stop bad things, which means they’re only needed to stop people who want to do bad things. Which is to say bad people. Good people definitionally never want to do bad things and so never need to be stopped: rules only get in their way.

The key here is the gap between intent and outcome, or rather the failure to realise there is a gap.

Chris Bertram @ OP

As always, some thought-provoking (and deeply concerning) stuff. I am, I´m afraid, relatively ignorant regarding these important topics (e.g. immigration, deportation, questions of who “counts” as a citizen, etc.), but from an idiot´s perspective I had some thoughts/questions (but please feel free to delete this comment if it wanders too far off topic, as I don´t want to distract from an important conversation).

General ramblings

Regarding the three points made by Chris Bertram (and I´m afraid these are probably somewhat naive thoughts), in reverse order, I wondered:

1) Regarding the popularity of this move – does anyone have a feel for it? While I can imagine a certain degree of indifference by most people, and certainly it will be popular among a certain crowd, do we have an idea of how it is actually being received? If I recall correctly, while looking into this a little using “the Google”, one of my hits was an article (from the Daily Mail no less!) highlighting one person targeted, and it seemed (for the DM) relatively sympathetic in painting them as “one of the good ones” facing deportation and leaving their kid behind. Not to suggest that the DM is exactly a bastion for the fair treatment of deportees, but I do wonder – if you´ve even lost the DM (albeit perhaps only a little, and in one specific case), how popular will it be with the majority of voters?

Also, as the chaos of Brexit kicks in – and we start seeing more headlines about people who are much harder to demonise (i.e. “Swedish oncologist who volunteers at kitten sanctuary kicked out!”) – will attitudes change (not that deportees are any less deserving, but purely as a question of changing optics)? Will the increased problems faced by even the relatively privileged start influencing perception of immigration and deportation too?

Or is this more one of those doomed-to-repeat-the-past type things?

2) Regarding Windrush is over. If I were feeling particularly cynical, I might suggest that it is a matter of finding the “right” people who can be safely “other-ed” in order to establish the principle, after which – well, now we have a precedent.

I have, for various reasons, always been a little wary of the indifference / hostility to people not deemed sufficiently “one-of-us”. Am I an outlier with respect to a majority of UKians?

It seems to me the UK has always been quite individualistic and a little suspicious of “foreigners” (perhaps as a result of being an island, perhaps partly played for “comedy”), but is this sort of active hostility more or less constant, cyclical, trending upwards, etc.?

3) The whole who is and isn´t British thing always seemed a little vague, to me at least. Indeed, I have always struggled a little with this, and never really got a clear response, as it seems to me that – when you come down to it – there isn´t really anything significant you can point at as exclusive to British people (and thus “what makes us British”). And, while I don´t wish to make light of cultural differences, I probably have far more in common with most of my “non-British” co-workers than I do with the “British” Rees-Mogg.

What I don´t really grok is why the sort of determinations being made in these cases are not getting much more pushback. Are people really so confident that these things can´t later be expanded to encompass whoever is convenient? Is this another example of the voting-for-leopards-eating-faces-party?

Again, apologies if my ramblings are OT, or perhaps my questions are not conducive to a sensible discussion – this is another area I need to read up on, and don´t really know where to begin.

JD – I’m not sure what your point is when you responded to me. The mechanisms that could be used to tame the media in the UK are there. If your point is that isn’t going to happen under the current government – well of course. But a Labour government if so motivated could do things quite easily.

How Labour get elected in such a media hostile environment is a different question, and I do think it kind of points to the irrelevance of the leader’s debate that nobody is really discussing this. But if things continue in their current direction then the future of the UK will look something a little like Hungary, or Berlusconi’s Italy.

The mechanisms that could be used to tame the media in the UK are there. If your point is that isn’t going to happen under the current government – well of course. But a Labour government if so motivated could do things quite easily.

Donald Trump could quite easily be less dishonest if so motivated. He’s not so motivated. It might be easy for anybody to be honest if so motivated, but it doesn’t matter how easy it is if the person is not so motivated.

Past Labour governments have not adopted the kind of media policy you recommend. If it’s as easy as you say it is, then a plausible explanation is that they have not been so motivated. If past Labour governments have not been so motivated, future Labour governments also might not be.

J-D: Wow, thanks for the truism wrapped up as profundity.

The last Labour government was in 2010. The last Labour leader who got easy coverage from the UK media (i.e. the kind of coverage taken for granted by the Conservatives) was Tony Blair, who debased himself before Murdoch. Every leader since 2007 has been monstered by the media, no matter what their policies. At this point, as the last election demonstrated, there is no path to power for Labour that does not involve sidelining the media. There was also the news international hacking scandal of 2011.

Is this enough? Who can say – but to make some facile comparison to Donald Trump is pretty stupid.

@63: ‘If the media is so powerful, how would you expect a Labour party that aims to clamp down on the media to ever win?’

How indeed?

‘The belief in the power of the media is in this way is self-contradictory.’

I don’t think that word (i.e. self-contradictory) means what you think it means.

@62: ‘Past Labour governments have not adopted the kind of media policy you recommend.’ Indeed they have not. And why do we think that is? One possibility is indeed that they are not so motivated. And why do we think that might be?

Ipso facto: what happened (i.e. in the media) to putative governments (e.g. Corbyn’s) that did indeed look as if they were so motivated? Did they gain power or not? And what was their treatment in the media? And is there any relationship between these two factors?

So many questions.

= = = The last Labour leader who got easy coverage from the UK media (i.e. the kind of coverage taken for granted by the Conservatives) was Tony Blair, who debased himself before Murdoch. Every leader since 2007 has been monstered by the media, no matter what their policies. = = =

We don’t know when Murdoch’s organization learned how to crack and monitor cell phones, nor how much compromising information they collected before being found out (if indeed they have actually stopped).

We should accept the truth that the popularity of the right wing media is in a large part a *symptom* of the Labour party’s failure to address and counter their messaging, their kneejerk abandonment of what are dismissed as “tory voters” as lost causes, and the inclination to alienate themselves from mainstream platforms percieved as hostile instead of engage in them. Everything else is just wishful thinking.

I mean, if people are genuine in their belief that Blair “debasing himself before Murdoch” makes all the difference – independent of actual Labour policy, the moral imperative for any future Labour leader should be to do the same.

Zhou Fang

We should accept the truth that …

We should not accept the truth of those assertions until they have been substantiated.

Does the contrary assertions have any better substantiation?

If you’ve got two contradictory assertions (P and not-P) and neither is substantiated, then what you’ve got is an open question and what you should do is suspend judgement.