General British politics discussion thread

In the UK Parliament can already amend any law for any reason. Even someone who is solid bone from ear to ear, as Raab appears to be, must know this.

What change is Raab proposing to make? His language is (perhaps deliberately?) obscure, but he talks about a "mechanism" to introduce "ad hoc legislation" to "correct" judgements which the Government regards as "incorrect".

"Ad hoc legislation" seems to suggest, not legislation of general application, but legislation that addresses the court judgment in a specific case. So in a deportation case, for example, the general law on when you can and can't be deported remains unchanged but you, Mr Bloggs, are going to be deported even though the UK courts have ruled, as a matter of UK law, that you can't be.

And the talk of introducing a "mechanism" means that the already-available mechanism - an Act of Parliament - is not going to be used.

And, crucially, the idea is not to "correct" judgements that Parliament regard as incorrect, but to judgements that the Government regards as incorrect. That suggests that he's thinking of a mechanism by which Ministers can override court rulings that they dislike on a case-by-case basis.

In democracies, of course, where they have concepts like the rule of law and the separation of powers, things like this cannot happen and anyone proposing them would be shot down in flames by his enemies and hidden away in embarrassment by his friends. So how this plays out will be an interesting test of how much of a democracy Brexit Britain is going to be.

Raab is an astonishingly stupid person, but even stupid people can come up with bad ideas — in fact they are more likely to offer bad ideas, since they are often too stupid to recognise how bad they are. Besides, if Raab's stupidity is an objection to his coming up with this idea, it is also an objection to Patel having come up with it - she is pretty much as stupid as Raab.

Plus, this idea does link fairly naturally to Raab's long-established obsession with human rights. He is very much in favour of human rights, unless they might constrain the actions of the British government, in which case he is very much against them. He wrote a book on the subject more than ten years ago, before Pritti Patel had even entered parliament, and has published frequently on it since. Nobody doubts that the court judgments that Raab wants to "correct' are those in which considerations of individual human rights are found to be an irksome constraint on government action.

As evidence of Raab's stupidity, I cite the very speech in which he calls for a mechanism for ad hoc legislation to "correct" court judgments that the government considers wrong. In another paragraph of the very same speech he claims that “we want the Supreme Court to have a last word on interpreting the laws of the land, not the Strasbourg court.” Yeah, Dominic, let's give the Supreme Court the last word by introducing a fast-track mechanism for politicians to overrule it if they don't like its judgments.

Well, no, it doesn't, since a moment's thought will show that there may be many cases where human rights considerations don't prevent removal of citizenship.

You're essentially arguing here that if human rights considerations ever prevent a state from removing citizenship, then there is no point in having a process for removal of citizenship. But to see the absurdity of that you only have to apply it to other punitive measures — if human rights considerations ever prevent the state from imprisoning somebody, then there is no point to having an imprisonment system.

Unless Raab gets his wish and government get to start "correcting" court decisions and there is no ECJ to fall back on

Surely in such a high profile case a phonecall was made between the UK and Bangladesh to confirm this ?

At least that's if everyone is being honest

It's not so simple, either way.

UK law does allow the Home Secretary to deprive someone of citizenship, provided (among other matters) the HS is satisfied that they are entitled to another citizenship (which is not the same as actually having another citizenship).

But on the face of it it looks odd for the HS to be satisfied that Begum is entitled to Bangladeshi citizenship, given what the Bangladeshi government is saying.

Normally, the next step would be for Begum to challenge the HS's decision in the courts, arguing that they are wrong to be satisfied that she is entitled to Bangladeshi citizenship, that they are disregarding relevant matter (viz, what the Bangladeshi government says), that they have made a decision no reasonable HS could have made, etc. This is all pretty standard administrative law stuff. In this case, she could also argue that it is unlawful for the HS to exercise their powers under the immigration legislation in a way that causes the UK to be in violation of the Convention on Statelessness by making here formally or effectively stateless. Off the top of my head, I'd say she has a pretty good case.

But, the thing is, in the conditions in which Begum is being held in Syria she doesn't have access to UK lawyers and can't instruct them to institute the necessary court proceedings. No other country - including Bangladesh - will take her, or has any obligation to take her, so she can't go to a third country and instruct UK lawyers from there. So the lawfulness of the HS's decision has never been tested. Begum has been stripped of her British citizenship, and rendered stateless, by an executive action which she has no effective right to challenge. Which from a human rights point of view looks bad, you'd have to say.

In effort to sort this out, her family applied for a permission for her to come to the UK so she could instruct lawyers. The HS refused. Her family then challenged this decision. (They don't have standing to challenge the decision to strip her of her citizenship; only she can do that. But they do have standing to challenge the decision to refuse the application for permission to enter, because it was their application.) But that challenge was ultimately unsuccessful in the Supreme Court.

Begum's next port of call would normally be the European Court of Human Rights, but she has the same access-to-lawyers problem to prevent her instituting a case there.

So, stalemate. The HS has made a decision which looks, um, questionable, but no challenge or scrutiny in the courts is possible. We cannot say that the HS's action is unlawful. But, equally, we cannot say that it is lawful.