I know actions speak louder than words, but top marks nevertheless to our new Home Secretary for her uncompromising attack on the migrants and their lawyers who lodge cynical last-minute legal challenges against deportation. Shabana Mahmood was right: these little cabals of wriggling rights experts are making a mockery of the law with their transparent excuses and prevarications.
Her patience snapped on Tuesday when a 25-year-old Eritrean man scheduled to be returned to France under the government’s much derided ‘one in, one out’ policy won a 14-day reprieve in the courts. His lawyers had argued, first, that he faced ‘destitution’ if he was sent back across the Channel, and then that he was ‘a victim of modern slavery’.
As Mahmood so pithily put it: “Migrants suddenly deciding they are a modern slave on the eve of their removal, having never made such a claim before, make a mockery of our laws and this country’s generosity.”
By Thursday, after a series of false starts and legal delays, the first returnee under the policy (believed to be an Indian man) was finally put on a plane and flown back to France. But the one-in-one-out scheme is clearly pitifully unfit for purpose. So Mahmood is going to have to do a lot more than talking tough.
She’s proposed a review of the Modern Slavery Act to prevent further abuses of that particular legislation. But how long would that take? And anyway, isn’t it just tinkering at the edges of the problem? Even if the ‘you can’t send me back, I’m a slave’ argument were to be quashed, another piece of legal sleight-of-hand would promptly take its place.
No. Illegal immigration has reached such preposterous levels that Mahmood must be radical, bold, and blunt. Reform and the Conservatives are already there: both parties agree that all asylum seekers arriving here illegally – such as by small boat – should be immediately interned and swiftly deported. Public support for that is overwhelming. What are you waiting for, Home Secretary?
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Now don’t get me wrong. I like a good nosey around someone else’s marriage as much as the next person, especially if they’re rich, famous, and colourful.
But I honestly think I’ve had enough of hearing about the Beckhams. I just don’t care any more. Is there anything left to learn about Posh and Becks? Such as who does the cooking, what they bicker about, and now – in a hugely-trailed Netflix three-part documentary – how Victoria is preparing ‘for the fashion show of her life’.
I mean, good luck to her and all that. But… I JUST. DON’T. CARE!
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Should you laugh at a funeral? It depends, doesn’t it? Sometimes the dear departed leave specific instructions for a particular joke to be told during the eulogy, or prank to be played at some point before, during or after the ceremony.
They may request a humorous or ironic song to be played at an appropriate moment. (I remember one cremation where Fire, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s 1960s hit, blared out as the flames beckoned.)
So was it fair for Prince Andrew to be lambasted this week after he was spotted chortling away at the Duchess of Kent’s funeral in Westminster Cathedral? I suppose the problem was that he seemed to be moving in determined fashion from one mourner to the next, grinning and laughing as he sought their attention.
To say the disgraced duke experienced multiple cold shoulders would be an understatement.
Perhaps it can be OK to laugh at a funeral – but it all depends on who’s doing the laughing
