Andrew Tettenborn

Kemi Badenoch’s announcement that the Conservatives are now irrevocably committed to pulling out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) surprised no-one. It was nevertheless nicely done, and showed that here at least the Tory leader is playing a bad hand rather well. The Tories have now stolen a march on Nigel Farage For one thing, this is patently the right decision for the UK. The baneful effects of scrupulous adherence to the ECHR have been apparent for some years. Migration is a straightforward example. The ever-widening Strasbourg interpretation of Articles 3 and 8, protecting freedom from torture and family life, which we then have to apply loyally, often makes securing our borders against those we do not want here nearly impossible.

Labour is again running scared on migration. At the party's conference yesterday, Shabana Mahmood made a clear pitch to middle Britain on the subject. 'You may not always like what I do,' she said, addressing Labour’s left, but as regards migration we had to 'question some of the assumptions and legal constraints that have lasted for a generation and more'. She would, she added, be tightening the rules on indefinite leave to remain (ILR). From now on, migrants would have to wait ten years rather than five to apply to settle permanently, though they could apply earlier if they spoke good English, volunteered in their local communities, were net contributors to the economy and had a 'spotless' criminal record.

There was a grain or two of truth in what Donald Trump said last week about migration. A polity is indeed vulnerable to being eaten from the inside by the entry of large numbers of people from very different backgrounds who are not inclined to embrace its culture in preference to their own. But the same does not go for his further advice that the best way to stop the rot was by bringing in the military. For one thing, there would be legal difficulties. By international treaty every country has to require its vessels to do what they can to rescue those in danger of being lost at sea. This applies even to those cynically abusing the rule by engaging, like many Channel migrants, in moral blackmail by deliberately endangering themselves and then demanding to be picked up.

The failure to deport any illegal migrants at all on the first designated flight to France yesterday under the agreement the government struck with France in August may be due to bad luck rather than bad management. This is still bad news for the nation; the smuggling gangs, far from being smashed by a complacent Keir Starmer, will now be airily reassuring clients that their investment is safe because, whatever the Home Office says, they are most unlikely to be sent back to France. However, in the longer term this is much worse news for Labour.  Labour are largely hamstrung here by their own ideology When the agreement for migrant returns was trumpeted amid manly hugs between Emmanuel Macron and Starmer, anyone who read the small print could see that it was largely meant for show.

How things change. Five years ago few electors cared about the UK’s membership of the ECHR. Today that same convention, with its baneful effect on our ability to police our borders and keep out undesirables, is fast taking centre stage and becoming Concern Number One with burgeoning numbers of voters: voters who, as the government knows to its consternation, increasingly doubt Labour’s ability or even willingness to do much about it. You can have ECHR membership plus loyal adherence to its requirements, or alternatively you can have a proper border policy. You can’t have both No doubt this is why the Attorney-General Lord Hermer, undoubtedly with the backing of the PM, weighed in this week.

Three researchers from Leicester University’s Centre for Hate Studies produced a curious report on Monday about the English countryside. Their theme is that much of rural England is a white racist redoubt, where anyone from an ethnic minority is made to feel unwelcome and psychologically, if not physically, excluded. People of colour, it is said, find themselves unaccepted, stared at, and occasionally insulted or worse. Serious measures, we are told, are called for to remove this injustice. You could dismiss this as yet another predictable production from a group of tiresomely progressive academics. And in a sense you would have a point.

It wasn’t surprising that the Home Office chose to back an urgent appeal in the Epping hotel case. Not only were its asylum arrangements in tatters as a result of Mr Justice Eyre’s decision last week: more important, the deadline of 12 September set by the court to stop the use of the Bell Hotel in Essex as a migrant centre on planning grounds faced it with a potential logistical nightmare. If more authorities followed the Epping line, things could have got exponentially worse. Legally, the Home Office has won; politically, its victory could be remarkably Pyrrhic The Court of Appeal’s discharge of the interim injunction this afternoon gives the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper welcome breathing-space. She can also take some comfort from the judgment itself.

If Nigel Farage wanted headline treatment for his immigration speech at Oxford Airport this morning, he certainly got it. So far the reaction has been fairly predictable. But politically, there is a good deal more to this affair than meets the eye. The difficulty faced by Farage’s opponents is that, whatever the details, the man’s underlying message rings entirely true One’s first thought, which is probably correct, is that he might well not be able to deliver on his ambition to remove 600,000 people unlawfully here in his first term.

The government is badly rattled on immigration. It knows that its perceived inability either to curb rampant asylum abuses or smartly deport those who ought not to be here amounts to an electoral threat. Over this Bank Holiday weekend the Home Office announced yet another scheme to deal with the matter. Currently anyone refused asylum or faced with removal can appeal to a court, namely the Immigration and Asylum division of the First-tier Tribunal, and from there (with permission) to another court, the Upper Tribunal. Even the first appeal can take over a year; and since, with a few exceptions, a person cannot be removed while an appeal is pending, the expense to the public of accommodating them meanwhile is prodigious.

Yesterday’s injunction granted to Epping Forest council giving the government three weeks to stop using the Bell Hotel for asylum seekers on planning grounds is not quite the slam-dunk that it looks. It is theoretically open to appeal: furthermore, it is only an interim measure pending a full trial later this year. But the affair has seriously spooked the government, and rightly so. Labour’s present immigration policy is now untenable What worries the Home Office is that it’s not only Epping. It seems a safe bet that the contagion will spread fast. As soon as the result was announced, Broxbourne, a nearby Tory council with a similar make-up to Epping, announced that it is contemplating following suit.

The Home Secretary’s extension of the list of countries covered by the ‘deport now, appeal later’ scheme for foreign criminals, announced this morning, doesn’t actually add to the number of undesirables that we can deport. But it could lubricate the process of getting rid of them. Barring a Damascene conversion of the Strasbourg court, something pretty inconceivable, withdrawal is fast becoming not only an option, but the only option For criminals from the new countries just added, which include a number of African and Asian states, India, Canada and Australia, it means that once the Home Secretary rejects an objection based on human rights grounds, physical removal can be automatic. The deportee can still appeal, but any appeal has to be pursued from abroad.

Last week, 15 judges from the International Court of Justice at the Vredespaleis in the Hague, at the request of the UN General Assembly, pronounced solemnly on climate change. Every state, they said, owed duties in international law to take all reasonable measures to suppress climate change; duties, they added, which included exercising control over the activities of private companies. Furthermore, they went on, any state that had broken that duty faced potential claims for compensation from any other state that had suffered damage. Environmental activists went wild.

To much fanfare, the Church of England this week instituted a plan, funded to the tune of some £150 million and overseen by a well-respected City law firm, to compensate the victims of abuse carried out by church officials. So far, so good. But when we are talking big money like this, eligibility needs to be carefully circumscribed, with tough boundaries set. Unfortunately, one doubts whether the new Abuse Redress Measure, which set up the scheme, does this. However well-intended, it actually risks a worryingly unpredictable and at times arbitrary use of church funds.

A major plank in the Labour Party’s electoral platform last year was its policy of scrupulous obedience to international law. Attorney-General Lord Hermer has repeatedly pushed this view, swearing undying loyalty to everything from pyjama injunctions coming out of Strasbourg to arrest warrants from the Hague. Unfortunately this exercise in legal piety is now coming back to bite the government big-time. It is making it very difficult for Britain to play what cards it has in the new international game of thrones. Most recently think of Midnight Hammer, the US bunker-buster strike on Iran. Britain, normally a keen supporter of the US, was unceremoniously sidelined.

At this stage we can’t predict what the government’s new grooming gangs inquiry will say. But one thing is overwhelmingly likely: many will feel the heat. This includes police who stood back in the face of clear patterns of child sexual exploitation by young Pakistani men to avoid racial tension; social workers desperate not to offend their largely unassimilated Muslim clients; and councillors and politicians who said ‘move on, nothing to see here’ because of fears that Muslim voters might disown anyone who rocked the multicultural boat. With few exceptions, academics were some of the keenest to suppress discussion about groooming gang abusers’ origins or ethnicity Even more interesting, however, is the light all this this has thrown on academia.