You read the headline right: an Albanian criminal was allowed to stay in Britain partly because his son will not eat foreign chicken nuggets. Truly, the Labour government’s attempt today to prove its worth on tackling illegal migration could not have got off to a worse start.
A report in today’s Telegraph points to an immigration tribunal in which it was deemed “unduly harsh” for the 10-year-old boy to be forced to move to Albania with his lawbreaking father because of sensory issues—the only stated example of which was the child’s distaste for the “type of chicken nuggets that are available abroad.”
The case was heard under the previous Conservative government, but remains a damning indictment of Labour’s supposed efforts to clamp down on illegal border crossings given that the judge’s ruling was made possible because of the UK’s attachment to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), from which prime minister Keir Starmer says “we will never withdraw.”
Labour has already been able to get some deportation flights off the ground and will use all the PR stunts at its disposal to claim “we are putting an end to” illegal migration. But so long as ECHR rules apply, removals on anything like the scale Britons want to see will remain impossible, often for ridiculous non-reasons. Hence Reform leader Nigel Farage’s comment to europeanconservative.com this month that in order to get serious on border security,
The first thing you have to do is change the law, get rid of the ECHR.
Robert Bates, who is research director at the Centre for Migration Control, also told this publication today that whatever Labour’s attempted distractions—or, as he put it, efforts to “pull the wool over our eyes”—suggest, “the British public aren’t fools.”
They can see the hotels full of young men, the pictures of the boats, and the sketchy businesses with untoward hiring practices. All representations of state failure.
Distancing itself from the failure displayed by the chicken nugget case, Labour stressed that “the government appealed that ruling straight away and that’s still before the courts. So that is an ongoing issue.”
But Bates argued that whatever the outcome, “we need a clear out of all immigration tribunal judges.”