I’m on Priti’s side – deporting criminals shows she’s on ours
Seventeen rapists, killers and drug dealers were deported in the small hours of yesterday morning. Not that Priti Patel was allowed to expel all of the 50 or so Jamaican-born criminals who were supposed to be on the Home Office flight. Lawyers representing some of the detainees applied for a judicial review and a judge ruled that the deportations should not go ahead if the offenders had been unable to make phone calls from detention centres because of “problems with an O2 phone mast”. A lawyerly loophole if ever I heard one.
More than 170 MPS urged the Government to stop the flight. Campaigners claimed that the deportation risked repeating the errors of the Windrush scandal when migrants from the Caribbean, who arrived in the UK before 1973, were wrongly deported.
What a hateful comparison. Most Britons were appalled to learn that West Indians who settled here, raised their families and made a terrific contribution, had been treated in such a cruel way. Just as most Britons will be appalled to learn that, once again, some judge has seen fit to put the rights of serious criminals who, between them, had been jailed for a total of 300 years, before the safety of the general public.
One of the offenders is believed to be Lloyd Byfield, a drug dealer who used a claw-hammer to murder 26-year-old Leighann Duffy in front of a six-year-old child. For connoisseurs of bitter ironies, that savage crime was committed seven years after Byfield should have been deported. He had been allowed to stay in Britain because he said he married in this country after arriving from Jamaica in 2000. But he had a separate girlfriend whom he attacked with a chisel in 2004 and then carried out a knifepoint burglary.
At Byfield’s second trial in 2015, the Old Bailey judge made a scathing attack on the Home Office. “You were to be deported,” he said, “but for reasons that can’t be explained to me it was not activated and you were able to kill a good, innocent woman in the presence of a child… this murder may have been prevented if systems had worked as they should have done.”
Too right. Let those campaigners who are wailing about “families being torn apart” reflect on the fact that a previous failure to deport Byfield cost Duffy her life and traumatised a little girl forever.
All credit to Patel for showing more
guts and determination than her two predecessors put together. In Downing Street, Dominic Cummings, the PM’S chief aide, was said to be furious, describing the Court of Appeal’s suspension of the deportation as “a perfect symbol of the British state’s dysfunction”. There must, he said, be “urgent action on the farce that the judicial review has become”.
And so say all of us. For some reason, I have never been able to forget Amy Houston, a 12-yearold girl who was knocked down in 2010 by failed asylum seeker Aso Mohammed Ibrahim, and left to “die like a dog” under the wheels of his car. Ibrahim, who was driving while disqualified, won a lengthy fight to stay here after judges ruled that sending him back to Iraq could breach his right to a “private and family life” as he had since fathered two children in the UK.
What of Amy’s family’s life? Our legal system thought that varmint’s right to a family life mattered more.
I know whose side I’m on. I’m on Patel’s side because Patel is on our side. Patel is with Paul Houston, Amy’s father, and the silent majority who think that guests in this country are welcome, but they should never abuse that privilege.
The British are a remarkably tolerant bunch, but I reckon we’ve had enough. We are fed up of lawyers arguing that poor terrorists must be released the better to stab innocent passers-by. We welcome the Government’s new move to keep them safely behind bars. We are horrified by judges ruling time and again against the interests of their own citizens.
Yesterday afternoon, Patel crisply pointed out that deporting foreign criminals after they’ve served their sentences was a law introduced by Labour in 2007. Attagirl! The Home Secretary will need every ounce of that inner steel to do battle with a human-rights industry that has warped our justice system to serve the villains not the victims. The country will be cheering her on.
We’re fed up of lawyers arguing poor terrorists must be released