Unrepentant Leftist comments.
Apr 14, 2025
Headline: Activist judges are getting too big for their wigs
Sub-headline: A catalogue of immigration cases has caused outcry — but don’t expect Labour to wade in.
Editor : The Reader only need confront the first paragraph, and the use of the term ‘Activist Judges’… to follow next is the Ronald Reagan favorite ‘Welfare Queens’ ? to confront Mr. Colvile’s not so latent xenophobia!
Week after week, the reports fill the papers. “Migrant avoids deportation because he lost his phone.” “Pakistani paedophile allowed to stay in UK because he is an alcoholic.” “Rapist’s criminal record is so bad he can’t be deported.” “Criminal’s deportation case halted over son’s dislike for chicken nuggets.” “Afghan woman can’t be deported because she has back pain.”
Even allowing for a certain level of journalistic exaggeration, we clearly find it harder than we should to kick out those who shouldn’t be here. So what’s gone wrong?
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Editor: The Reader might wonder about the British Empire and how it strip-mined its Colonial Possesions over centuries: that is carefully elided from the Mr. Covle’s rant, about the undeservig grifters on the dole. It could be argued that those on the dole are the watershed of that Empire, and its criminal eterprise refracted though time? Mr. Colevile is a Thaterite of a certain political class, in sum an Oxbridger whose veration of The Iron Lady is toxic! Should The Reader pay due attention to Mr. Colvile’s arguments?
Well, Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, thinks much of the blame lies with lawyers like Greg Ó Ceallaigh. Ó Ceallaigh is a crusading KC, who supports the abolition of the Illegal Migration Act, has called Tory politicians “terrible crooks” and tweeted in 2012 that the party “need to be dealt with as you would deal with the Nazis, cancer or lava”. But he also moonlights as a migration judge.
I’m not suggesting Ó Ceallaigh’s judicial verdicts are driven by his politics, though he has certainly contributed to the catalogue above. (“Covid made me commit crime, claims drug dealer spared deportation”.) But it is definitely true that the people who become migration judges tend to be migration lawyers — and that such lawyers generally got into the field to protect migrants’ rights, not borders.
Indeed, asylum and migration is widely accepted to be one of the most left-wing parts of an increasingly left-wing profession. In surveys by The Lawyer, the magazine’s readers voted overwhelmingly for the Lib Dems in 2019, and even more overwhelmingly for Labour in 2024.
Editor : Mr. Colevile presents Greg Ó Ceallaigh in a Dickensian shadow, in his utter mendacity and ‘left-wing politics’. But reader notice how the cast of characters grows into a 885 word tyrade, against a set of bad political actors in the Colvile Political Imagination! A sampler of the miscreants exhaustes the readers patience , so let me be parsimonious in my selection!
1) A few months ago, every living lord chief justice co-authored a report on prisons policy, urging more leniency and lamenting the fact that idiot politicians, egged on by the media, kept pushing for tougher sentencing.
2) The nutrient neutrality scandal has seen tens of thousands of houses blocked by a disastrously strict interpretation of habitat regulations. And the government has yet to explain why we are legally obliged to give up the Chagos islands, let alone hand billions to Mauritius for the privilege.
3) When the row over “two-tier justice” broke out, the chairman of the Sentencing Council sent the justice secretary an astonishingly high-handed letter, warning that the judiciary accepted sentencing guidelines only because they were written by the judiciary, and that for “sentencing guidelines of whatever kind …
4) Similarly, when Kemi Badenoch and Sir Keir Starmer agreed it was utterly wrong for a Gazan family to be granted asylum under a scheme reserved for Ukrainians, the lady chief justice said the lack of respect for judicial independence left her “deeply troubled”.
5)As are many of his closest friends — including Philippe Sands, who has driven the Chagos case, and the attorney-general, Lord Hermer.
6)That might seem like a commendable blow for equality. But the more you dig into the equal pay rules, the less that argument convinces.
7)The clothing firm Next, for example, was punished for paying warehouse workers more than retail staff because those jobs were male and female-coded — even though it did not pay a single woman less than a man for doing the same job, and almost half of its warehouse workers were female.
8)The same legal constraints have seen the NHS grade all staff according to an impossibly complicated formula that creates arbitrary equivalence between completely different roles.
9)For example, the evidence in the Next case was very clear that there is more demand for warehouse workers than retail staff, that pay for such roles is higher, and that the firm had begged staff in its stores to shift over.
10)Rather than reflecting reality, the equal pay regime has become a charter for trade unions to milk employers. And I’ve explained it at such length because Labour is hugely expanding its scope.
11)It gives unions the right to enter workplaces where they aren’t recognised, and forces firms to give union “equality representatives” time off to attend to those duties.
12)Ministers will also activate the long-dormant “socioeconomic duty” within the Equality Act, which means every single decision made by the state must be evaluated according to its impact on disadvantage. And all of this will be policed by legal case after legal case.
13)During the Tory leadership contest, Tom Tugendhat argued that Britain is increasingly subject not to the rule of law but the rule of lawyers. That’s been great for the legal profession — but not so much for the rest of us. And sadly, the lawyers around the cabinet table are set to make things very much worse.
Editor: Though my attempt at parsimony, may have been limited by Mr. Colvile’s Thatcherite Historical Sweep, the reader is given key passages from which to reach the essentials, if that is what they be?
Unrepentant Leftist.
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