‘Immigration decisions are embarrassing — elected judges would fix this’

Last week’s slew of perverse immigration decisions was a national embarrassment. They raised the bar of legal stupidity, highlighted just how ridiculous our immigration system has become and, by allowing those foreign criminals to remain in Britain, has made our country more dangerous.

I mean how could a UK judge decide not to send a convicted Zimbabwean paedophile back to Zimbabwe? Why would they think “hostility” towards a criminal in his home country was worse than putting innocent children in ours in danger?

This was followed by another idiotic decision allowing an Albanian criminal to avoid deportation after claiming his son had an aversion to foreign chicken nuggets, and then a jailed Pakistani paedophile escaped removal from the UK as it would be “unduly harsh” on his own children.

If our judges have become so removed from reality to pass such judgements, and Parliament – despite its best efforts – finds itself unable to draft laws which judges find themselves bound by, then it’s time they had their judicial wigs removed from them.

The current situation certainly can’t be allowed to stand and stems back to Tony Blair, who through his 1998 Human Rights Act, put into UK law the European Convention on Human Rights. That fundamentally introduced a lawyers’ charter, altered the balance between law-makers and the courts, and allowed judges to decide what the law should be based on their own political opinions.

It cast aside the “rule of law” as we know it, and brought the whole constitutional settlement, upon which we have relied, into disrepute. The sovereignty of Parliament cannot be asserted again until the Human Rights Act is repealed.

The last government tried – and failed – to tackle this judicial activism, but Starmer’s government won’t even try. He is a human rights lawyer, and has made his good friend (and fellow human rights lawyer) Lord Hermer the country’s Attorney General. Both kneel at the altar of the ECHR and the International Court of Justice, and seem entirely relaxed about judges deciding the law rather than Parliament.

So when JD Vance spoke of “the enemy within”, he was spot on, but in the UK, it’s even worse than that as the enemy is not only within, it’s at the very top and out of control.

People saying that we must leave the ECHR in order to ensure we effectively remove illegal immigrants from the country. We should indeed do that, but alone it is not enough. We have to also scrap the Human Rights Act in the UK. Nothing less has a hope of working.

Even that may not be enough. Judges seem to have become accustomed to having the power to impose decisions on the country based on what they think the law should be rather than what it is.

If they will not change this very unwelcome recent development, then perhaps we should consider going down the US route of electing judges. That would certainly put a stop to these perverse decisions.