What is the message that comes from the High Court’s decision to back Epping Forest Council’s petition to close the Bell Hotel, which has been used to accommodate people seeking asylum?
It is not, as has been propagandised, that the establishment judges – who, it turns out, are not “enemies of the people” after all – listened with sympathy to the cries of the mums and nans demonstrating outside the hotel and begging for protection for their kids (after one of the people in the hotel was arrested and then charged with a sexual assault). The High Court didn’t take a view on that.
They granted an interim injunction requested by the council to end the hotel’s current usage with 14 days’ notice on… planning grounds. Nothing much to do with human rights, community safety, crime levels, public concerns, Reform UK or various politicians, propagandists, troublemakers and digital activists (human or not) jumping on the cause. It was a breach of planning rules about purpose, the same as if someone had turned a shop into a restaurant.
In a way, that makes the judgment a much more powerful affair than if it had been imposed by an official using some ambiguous, legally questionable authority. If it’s wrong for a hotel in Essex to be used in this way, then it’s wrong for a hotel anywhere in the country to be put to such a use. There are “acute” difficulties with this, as the Home Office warned. Where to put them?
The unintended consequence of the ruling is that the High Court has inadvertently created, to borrow a politically fashionable expression, a “two-tier” system. Councils that proactively pursue legal action can have so-called migrant hotels in their area closed down. Less activist and arguably more humane councils in other places may not choose to take up the opportunity. Maybe individuals or groups can, in any case. But that means that migrants can be effectively “deported” from one county to another by the Home Office. Or, alternatively, they end up in flats or houses of multiple occupation (HMO) in the original local authority, or elsewhere, and not in breach of the planning process.
At any rate, where to house asylum seekers will soon become an even more chaotic and highly charged issue than it is now, especially if demonstrations start up in streets where there’s an HMO, and the police will find it difficult to be in too many places at once. There will, in other words, be more trouble, and it will prove more difficult to contain it. That’s not the High Court’s problem, but it’s everyone else’s.
There is, it’s claimed, a simple answer to this: “Deport!” If it were as simple as that, it would have been done long ago by politicians under intense political pressure. Quite apart from the inviolable right under international law to claim asylum – let’s just say that’s been abolished – these people still need to be processed, if only to determine where to send them. Some countries are dangerous; fine, say the advocates for immediate expulsion. But those countries, and safer ones, may not wish to take people back. We can’t force another country to accept them, still less stop them trying to get back to Britain.
Take them to international waters? A long way from the English Channel, and it wouldn’t necessarily prevent them from making a return journey. Shall we “tow them back to France, a safe country”, as is often the reply? Well, no, because that would be a violation of French sovereignty. Apart from the minimal new returns arrangements, there is no lawful method of doing this. How, it might be asked, would we feel if the French navy brought them back to the south coast of England? Insane. It would risk confrontation with the French navy and a serious breach in relations with Paris and, thus, the EU. That would be bad for national security and for trade. Even Nigel Farage, history buff and atavistic patriot, might not wish for a return to a comic opera version of the Napoleonic Wars. Put them in tents? OK – but where? Place them in detention camps? Fine – but where? “Not in my back yard” is the usual answer, which doesn’t sound like a workable solution at scale.
The challenge of irregular migration is very obviously an intractable one to which there are no easy answers, and which has been made quite a bit more difficult by the High Court judges. Even so, they are doing their job, and an independent judiciary free of political pressure and media bullying is an essential part of our way of life. It should not matter to any court that Yvette Cooper is troubled by it, nor, for that matter, that some overheated pundit on Talk TV has got the champagne out.
We should respect court decisions that are awkward or offensive. We should also spare a thought for the future of other human beings genuinely fleeing torture or execution, as some undoubtedly are, with no desire to break the law or attack anyone. It’s unfashionable to say such things right now, but even if they are “just” economic migrants, their lives matter too.
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