WANT TO LIVE in Britain?, asked
The Sun this week. “Fancy some free money? Want a nice house? Want to sponge off the State?
“All you need do is buy a gun and hijack a plane.”
The Sun was reacting to the High Court’s ruling that the men who hijacked a domestic Afghan flight have the right to remain with their families in Britain until it is safe for them to return. This follows a long saga in which successive home secretaries have sought to thwart an immigration appeals tribunal, which had upheld the appeal by the Afghans against deportation.
I well remember the day in February 2000. The hijackers had been hauled off their Boeing 727 at Stansted. I was watching the news with a couple of friends. Before the hijackers’ reasons or personal circumstances were known, Jack Straw, who was then Home Secretary, declared that all would be deported “as soon as reasonably practicable” because he was “utterly determined that nobody should consider that there can be any benefit in hijacking”.
“Hmm,” I thought. “And what if some Jews had escaped from Auschwitz and hijacked a plane and flown to England? And did we always return to the USSR refugees who had seized the means of their transport in order to escape?”
I remarked to my friends that the Home Secretary had just handed the hijackers’ legal counsel a corker of an argument, because it would now be difficult for the Government to claim that any individual case had been considered on merit. The Home Secretary had as good as declared that he would be deaf to the merits. I lay no claim to a razor-sharp legal brain. Any first-year law student would have seen as much.
As unwise have been the Prime Minister’s off-the-cuff remarks on the case this week. I quote them verbatim: “We can’t have a situation in which people who hijack a plane . . . we are not able to deport back to their country. It is not an abuse of justice for us to order their deportation. It is an abuse of common sense, frankly, to be in a position where we can’t do this.”
The PM is a bit muddled here. By no means had the High Court ruled that “we are not able” to deport people like this; the Court had ruled that such people can only be deported if their cases for asylum fail on their merits; that the Home Secretary cannot arbitrarily create a category of applicants who are to be automatically refused asylum on account of the means they employed to reach Britain.
Such a category could be created, of course, but it would have to be done by law. We do not have such a law. Perhaps (as The Sun believes) we should. Perhaps the present law is wrong. EVIL TRIUMPHS said its headline; but, demonstrating a more sophisticated grasp of the issues than the Prime Minister, The Sun went on to conclude that the law we have is “a stupid law”. So The Sun at least recognises that it is possible for the law to yield results that defy common sense. Mr Blair’s reasoning is more primitive. He thinks that if something does not seem to him to be common sense, it cannot be the law. It was dismaying to see David Cameron and David Davis chiming in too; and cheap of the Conservatives to jump on this bandwagon.
As the judge pointed out: “Lest there be any misunderstanding, the issue in this case is not whether the executive should take action to discourage hijacking, but whether the executive should be required to take such action within the law as laid down by Parliament and the courts.”
A forlorn hope on the judge’s part. Yet we do need these rules and definitions, and we do have to respect them. It’s called the rule of law. I am sorry to labour what for many readers may seem an obvious truth, but I believe the late 20th and early 21st centuries have seen something of a slipping of attention to this truth in Britain, and that Tony Blair, with his rather 1970s New Seekers vision of self-evident morality and “natural” law, is the worst but not the only exemplar of a dangerously lazy approach to the idea of due process, and the ideal of certainty of contract between the citizen and the State.
Just the other week the Chancellor of the Exchequer (without bothering to mention it in his Budget Statement) announced plans to rip up, retrospectively, arrangements that millions have planned for their legacies when they die. Whatever view you take of the use of trusts, the citizen must know where he stands, and where he will stand. Gordon Brown’s careless disregard for a whole web of presumed entitlements unsettles me. How confident can we now be that pensions really will be linked to earnings in 2012? How sure are new parents of the future of the new “baby bonds”?
I am talking about what we might call a corruption of the fabric of expectation in society: slow, incremental, and rather abstract; but no less poisonous for being hard to dramatise.
Tangential, I know, but the same carelessness towards a time-honoured relationship has been exhibited towards the voter and the voting system. Without proper discussion or consideration, an ancient idea, that an election takes place on a particular day and in a particular place, has been knocked aside by a loose arrangement for postal voting which, even were it not (as it is) a vote-rigger’s charter, kicks away our subliminally important sense of contact, and contract, with the ballot box.
Or take a dry topic, yet at the centre of many of our countrymen’s household budgets: the new tax credit system. The computer system failed to work; two million poor families were forced to repay a total of £2 billion in wrongly assessed payments during the first year. Overpayments are still running at about £2 billion a year; six million families claim credit, and there is no promise that the system will be fixed. Millions of the poorest people have had to repay what are, for them, huge sums. Millions will prove unable to. Those who have repaid will resent those who have not. Everyone will view the next big government initiative with diminished confidence. In a complicated system such as ours, confidence is the cement of what politicians call “social justice”. From ministers the fiasco has elicited something not far from a shrug of the shoulders, as though only intentions count.
In the countryside where I live, something similar has happened. There has been a fundamental change to the subsidy structure for those who live off the land. But the computer system does not work and, as of April 25, only £432 million out of an expected £1.6 billion had been paid, though the original deadline was the end of next month. Some farmers face bankruptcy; many must now service huge bank loans. And if promoting to Foreign Secretary the Cabinet minister who oversaw all this is not a shrug of the shoulders, what is?
I could mention the Child Support Agency; the firm, repeated, broken promises of NHS dentistry; the virtual (though undeclared) abandonment of clear Home Office rules about released foreign prisoners . . . to me, through all these very different problems a thread does seem to run. It is insidious: at a national level a gradual, modest but persistent corruption of the fabric of expectations: a chipping-away at confidence in the contract between citizen and State. Slowly, we are getting more like a banana republic where promises are cheap, nothing ever really happens and nobody expects it to.
I am sorry to sound portentous but I fear we are losing what you might call administrative certainty, a deeply unsexy term and hard to make an issue of. Slow to accumulate and easy to squander, certainty matters.
timesonline.co.uk/matthewparris
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