A shameful piece of nonsense

I think the first thing which needs to be said about the strange case of Abid Naseer and Ahmad Faraz Khan is that they arrived in the UK on legitimate visas and have not been convicted of any crime. In fact they have not even been charged.

However the Home Office wanted them deported, convinced they were al-Qaeda operatives and a danger to national security. A judge has now said that they cannot be deported because they might face torture.

A number of lessons need to be drawn from this. The first is, that having been told for years that our Foreign Office is a Rolls Royce machine, we are slowly coming to the certainty that it is comprised of a bunch of lazy, ineffective pen-pushers. Pakistan is supposed to be an ally of the UK in the war on terrorism, and we couldn’t even get some assurance that they wouldn’t torture their own people for something done here? We’re on the same side for God’s sake!

Incidentally, I don’t think the British Public are in tune with the politically right-on about torture. I think an opinion poll would reveal that the vast majority wouldn’t care if these people were tortured by their own government. It goes on in China all the time and we never complain about that.

The second lesson is that whatever we do in this coalition period it is clear that a priority must be getting rid of the absurd human rights legislation. Foreign lawmaking judges can hand down interpretations to British Courts to the effect that legislation, even the control over our borders, is now out of our hands.

So what will happen to this strange pair who are seeking asylum in a country where they apparently intended to commit mass murder? The Home Secretary, Teresa May, who has not had a good start, has suggested that they will be subject to control orders. I am against these. I think the guilty should be sent to prison and the not-guilty left alone. Control orders are a way of imprisoning the innocent.

But we’ll have to keep an eye on Messrs. Naseer and Khan. To mount 24hr surveillance requires 50 operatives.

Could someone in authority please take a step backwards and tell us whether this state of affairs is (a) roughly what they envisaged, (b) sustainable and (c) a suitable example of governance for the future. The new Lord Chancellor, who has also had a poor start, has said that reviewing the human rights legislation is not a priority. I think it is. This is clearly a piece of idiotic nonsense.

As someone said during the election campaign, we can’t go on like this.