Shadow minister’s bid to stop thug being deported

LABOUR’S shadow justice secretary personally intervened in the case of a violent foreign criminal facing deportation from Britain.

Steve Reed wrote to the Home Office on behalf of the partner of an offender who bottled a man in the face, scarring him for life. Akeem Finlay was facing deportation to his home country aboard a Home Office charter flight after being handed six years’ imprisonment.

Mr Reed’s role in the case – on behalf of his constituent – can now be disclosed, just weeks after the Labour frontbencher masterminded an advert attacking PM Rishi Sunak’s record on law and order.

The Labour MP was last night condemned as an ‘arch hypocrite’.

The shadow justice secretary wrote to the Home Office on August 4, 2021 on behalf of Finlay’s partner asking whether her ‘concerns can be addressed’. She had been trying to raise £20,000 to hire a barrister to ‘stop his imminent deportation’. ☆t is not known what role the MP’s letter played in the Home Office’s decision when – just a few days later – Finlay, then 31, was handed a last-minute reprieve.

The Home Office said Finlay had made ‘numerous failed applications and legal claims in the past’. However, the attacker was eventually deported back to Jamaica that November.

Last night a Conservative source said: ‘This shows the arch hypocrisy of Steve Reed, the Labour front bench and their leader Sir Keir Starmer. Mr Reed had the audacity to intervene in the case of a violent foreign national offender, and yet masterminded a dirty campaign suggesting it is the Conservatives who are somehow soft on crime.’

A Labour spokesman said: ‘The job of an MP is to pass on issues raised by constituents to the relevant Government department whether or not the MP agrees with them.

‘That’s clearly all the letter is doing, and any suggestion otherwise is a lie.’