Like the UK, the country is struggling with the issue of what can be done about unlawful non-citizens who cannot currently be deported and have committed serious crimes.
Complex problems often require international cooperation, and cooperation is more likely to be effective within a framework of mutually respected laws.
The Prime Minister’s mooted emergency legislation seems unlikely to pass; even if it did, there is hardly time before the next election to get the policy operational.
But if such a programme extends beyond stemming the flow of cash (or at least attempting to do so), it is once again going to come back to law and enforcement. And that is thorny ground.
Also: Scottish Government’s legal regulation reforms denounced by judges and lawyers; Ross offers to work with Nationalist rebels to break Greens’ grip on government; new scandal for PSNI as High Court finds it illegally disciplined officers.
Even without withdrawing from or renegotiating the Aarhus Convention, there is scope for the Government to raise cost limits, and thus reduce friction and costs in the planning system.
Labour are happy to hammer the Government for it’s lack of progress, but lack any convincing alternative plan to make the system effective and bring numbers down.
Why should a previous government’s commitment to the international community trump (in practice if not in legal theory) a later government’s commitments to the British people?
As my old friend Ken Clarke said last week, opponents of the policy have not come up with any practicable alternative to it.
At the very least, create separate processes for a swift, inquisitorial, ‘Black Box’ investigation to find facts and learn lessons, rather than assign blame or provide catharsis.
He defends the Government’s approach to the Covid inquiry, in light of its commitments to “end the abuse of the judicial review”.
This excellent telling of the clash between Francis Bacon and Edward Coke draws out the men beneath the legend.
Like any tool, civil rights law and be used for good or ill. Parts of the left are committed to wielding it as a sword; conservative should be prepared, as Kemi Badenoch said of the UK’s Equality Act, to use it as a shield.