Mario Creatura was a councillor in Croydon and the former Conservative candidate for Croydon Central in 2019.
My father came to Britain from Italy in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister.
He came here wanting to build a successful life. He did not expect special treatment or the rules to be bent for him; he worked hard, paid his way, accepted the obligations that came with living here, and was grateful for the opportunities Britain gave his family.
That experience shaped my view of immigration. Those who come here should be law-abiding, contribute to society and respect the country they are joining. Where they do not, they should lose the right to stay. And those who dodge our rules altogether should not be rewarded by a legal system that seems determined to find ever more creative reasons why Britain cannot enforce its own borders.
That is why a recent immigration tribunal ruling is so damaging.
According to reports just over a week or so ago, a family of 18 from Gaza has won the right to come to Britain under human rights law, despite the Home Office refusing the application. The case began with a woman already granted asylum in the UK, who sought to bring over her wider extended family. The tribunal accepted that refusing entry would breach her right to family life under the European Convention on Human Rights.
The relatives reportedly include parents, siblings, spouses, nieces and nephews. Most adult applicants, reports say, could not speak English. Accommodation was limited. The family would require access to public funds.
Most of us will look at those facts and ask the same question: how can this possibly be fair?
Every day, people try to come to Britain legally. They fill in forms, pay fees, meet salary thresholds, learn English, sponsor family members properly and wait their turn. Many are refused – others wait years.
Then they read about cases where human rights law creates a route around the rules Parliament has set. As a proud citizen of this country, born and bred, it offends me to think that people like my father could today be queue-jumped by those who rely on the ECHR to bypass the rules others are expected to follow.
Our Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Philp, has been right to say this plainly and often. People have repeatedly voted for immigration to be controlled, illegal entry to be stopped and foreign criminals to be deported. Yet while Parliament tries to restore control, the legal framework we are tied to moves in the opposite direction, creating ever more permissive interpretations of the rules.
Kemi Badenoch’s commitment to leave the ECHR was not tossed out for applause. It followed proper legal work, including analysis commissioned from Lord Wolfson KC, who concluded that the ECHR places significant restrictions on the ability of government and Parliament to operate the UK’s immigration policies.
The BORDERS plan is explicit: leave the ECHR, exit ECAT, repeal the Human Rights Act, end the Immigration Tribunal, deport foreign criminals and remove illegal entrants swiftly.
Our traditions of common law, parliamentary scrutiny and democratic accountability long predate the Convention. It is a left-wing falsehood to suggest that, without the supervision of foreign judges, Britain could not administer a fair immigration system.
At the heart of this is sovereignty. Our Parliament and our laws should control the scale of legal migration. We elect MPs to make decisions on our behalf, and when they fail, we can remove them. That is how democratic accountability works. But when courts applying convention rights repeatedly prevent the enforcement of immigration rules, that accountability is broken.
This is why the ECHR is fundamentally unfair to those who follow the rules. It tells them that patience, contribution and respect for the law can be overtaken by the most inventive legal workaround.
That is not compassion. It is democratic failure.
My father’s generation understood the bargain clearly: opportunity came with obligation. You worked hard, paid your way, respected the country you had joined, and did not expect the rules to be rewritten for you.
We need to get back to those basics: fairness, personal responsibility, national sovereignty and democratic consent.
Leaving the ECHR is about more than sovereign control of our borders. It sends a signal about our standards, our values and our respect for law and order. That’s why it’s such an important policy.
Mario Creatura was a councillor in Croydon and the former Conservative candidate for Croydon Central in 2019.
My father came to Britain from Italy in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister.
He came here wanting to build a successful life. He did not expect special treatment or the rules to be bent for him; he worked hard, paid his way, accepted the obligations that came with living here, and was grateful for the opportunities Britain gave his family.
That experience shaped my view of immigration. Those who come here should be law-abiding, contribute to society and respect the country they are joining. Where they do not, they should lose the right to stay. And those who dodge our rules altogether should not be rewarded by a legal system that seems determined to find ever more creative reasons why Britain cannot enforce its own borders.
That is why a recent immigration tribunal ruling is so damaging.
According to reports just over a week or so ago, a family of 18 from Gaza has won the right to come to Britain under human rights law, despite the Home Office refusing the application. The case began with a woman already granted asylum in the UK, who sought to bring over her wider extended family. The tribunal accepted that refusing entry would breach her right to family life under the European Convention on Human Rights.
The relatives reportedly include parents, siblings, spouses, nieces and nephews. Most adult applicants, reports say, could not speak English. Accommodation was limited. The family would require access to public funds.
Most of us will look at those facts and ask the same question: how can this possibly be fair?
Every day, people try to come to Britain legally. They fill in forms, pay fees, meet salary thresholds, learn English, sponsor family members properly and wait their turn. Many are refused – others wait years.
Then they read about cases where human rights law creates a route around the rules Parliament has set. As a proud citizen of this country, born and bred, it offends me to think that people like my father could today be queue-jumped by those who rely on the ECHR to bypass the rules others are expected to follow.
Our Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Philp, has been right to say this plainly and often. People have repeatedly voted for immigration to be controlled, illegal entry to be stopped and foreign criminals to be deported. Yet while Parliament tries to restore control, the legal framework we are tied to moves in the opposite direction, creating ever more permissive interpretations of the rules.
Kemi Badenoch’s commitment to leave the ECHR was not tossed out for applause. It followed proper legal work, including analysis commissioned from Lord Wolfson KC, who concluded that the ECHR places significant restrictions on the ability of government and Parliament to operate the UK’s immigration policies.
The BORDERS plan is explicit: leave the ECHR, exit ECAT, repeal the Human Rights Act, end the Immigration Tribunal, deport foreign criminals and remove illegal entrants swiftly.
Our traditions of common law, parliamentary scrutiny and democratic accountability long predate the Convention. It is a left-wing falsehood to suggest that, without the supervision of foreign judges, Britain could not administer a fair immigration system.
At the heart of this is sovereignty. Our Parliament and our laws should control the scale of legal migration. We elect MPs to make decisions on our behalf, and when they fail, we can remove them. That is how democratic accountability works. But when courts applying convention rights repeatedly prevent the enforcement of immigration rules, that accountability is broken.
This is why the ECHR is fundamentally unfair to those who follow the rules. It tells them that patience, contribution and respect for the law can be overtaken by the most inventive legal workaround.
That is not compassion. It is democratic failure.
My father’s generation understood the bargain clearly: opportunity came with obligation. You worked hard, paid your way, respected the country you had joined, and did not expect the rules to be rewritten for you.
We need to get back to those basics: fairness, personal responsibility, national sovereignty and democratic consent.
Leaving the ECHR is about more than sovereign control of our borders. It sends a signal about our standards, our values and our respect for law and order. That’s why it’s such an important policy.