# Oh, it all makes work for the working man to do #
Like the old song, why would lawyers or judges be in favour of an obvious, easier process which doesn't involve them at all? Much as it would benefit the country, that is by no means their main concern ... exactly like our politicians.
Interestingly, an actual majority of senior Chinese politicians are qualified engineers or scientists. People who have made a living dealing with reality, whereas lawyers...
The whole Immigration Tribunal system and the rules it applies is the literal manifestation of a farce. The answer is to abolish it. All applications and appeals should be made from outside the UK. That would de-couple the Human Rights lawyers' gravy train from UK taxpayer funding.
Yes, I agree. Appeals etc. being outside the UK, perhaps in the individual's home country, is a good principle but it's not obvious how it would work in practice.
Would the miscreant have to appeal after deportation from the UK under the laws and procedures of their home country? If so, would we then have to pay for representation of the UK in, say, Bangladeshi courts? And what would happen if the judgement went against us?
It seems to me that the only civilised way is that we have to be firm and say once you're out you ain't coming back. And make sure all immigrants know this.
No, it would be like visa applications through the local British Embassy (which would only permit Mother Theresa and Albert Einstein types to succeed).
The practical issue is proper screening at the UK border: how do so many deportees simply wander back in? There is no proper system of screening or tracking overstayers.
If I had the job, I guarantee I'd devise a watertight system!! The Blob has no will to do this, staffed by Fifth Columnists as it is.
I reckon there are so many writers and commenters on Substack ( you included - I used to read Panocracy) who could run our country a million times better than the clowns currently in charge!
Three thoughts. The acceptance of what I call the 'his mother didn't love him' style defence needs to be stopped. Secondly, if someone does face persecution in their home country the appropriate question is 'and?' Thirdly, whilst I agree, David, with your thoughts on the application of rules, I am very comfortable with the notion of one set for the nationals and another for foreigners; not in terms of establishing guilt, but in subsequent treatment. Homegrown criminals are, alas, a problem we are obliged to manage; foreign ones absolutely are not. Living here is a privilege not a right, no matter how shitty your home country.
Ah so now any offender can present a ‘hurt people hurt people’ defence and Judges melt with compassion and sympathy.
How is it that this country, with a rich history of deporting its own criminals 250+ years ago, can’t stomach deporting foreigners? As a foreigner, I find this maddening.
This makes depressing reading. Most depressing though, is the question of how a malfunctioning system is corrected. The individuals who would be charged with doing so would also be the products of the dysfunctional systems that causes these absurd judgements, and hence would likely make it worse. I am not aware of one single person, in any field whatsoever who displays the capacity to see the problem, define the problem, set out a solution to the problem and implement that steps required to reach the solution. I do not think, though I may be wrong, that collapse of our society, caused by foxes, can be restored by foxes so we will have to wait for a lion to appear.
I also find it hard to understand that there can be an appeal to the Upper Tribunal, which reviews the case and decides that the decision of the First Tier Tribunal was wrong; and yet the case is sent back to the First Tier Tribunal for yet another review. Why is the appeal not simply successful, allowing the Home Office to go ahead and deport?
Looks to me like a seriously flawed process, quite apart from the way it is being applied.
In defence of the process, it’s because there couldn’t be a finding of fact by the Upper Tribunal - the facts the First Tier Tribunal relied on were flawed so the whole thing needs to be redone with a new factual assessment (which the Upper Tribunal can’t do). All well and good until you remember there’s a backlog of at least 90,000 cases….
Except that the Upper Tribunal did do a factual assessment in order to conclude that the assessment of the First Tier Tribunal was wrong. The whole process is ridiculous. If you appeal successfully against a conviction for theft, for example, the Appeal Court doesn't order a retrial. It clears you.
I know what you mean, but strictly speaking the Upper Tribunal didn't do a factual assessment of its own. It isn't in a position to do that. It just looked at whether the First Tier Tribunal had erred without making a fresh finding.
One wonders if there would be different rulings if the judges of the First Tier Tribunal were made to live, with their families, in communities with large numbers of immigrants. We could billet politicians there while we're at it and see if they change their minds about human rights law.
These rulings, and other aspects of our political culture, represent a society where the ruling class has little or no direct contact with the masses, but imposes a highly politicised understanding of the law on them based on abstract notions of universal care and fundamental human goodness that have no logical or empirical basis.
Essentially, we live in a kind of secular theocracy in which the clerics who make and enforce the laws are cloistered away, living the good life, while the laity bears the consequences of their luxury beliefs, and are damned for blasphemy and heresy when they complain.
The more I think about things, the more I think we are just at the end of a long 1,000 year cycle and have lived for so long with the fruits of a high trust society we are as vulnerable as the Dodo was.
Look into the recent Mail article on the huge mega mosque being built in the Lake District and the opinions of the people their - they already know the people protesting are racist. Case closed. A comfortably certain world they inhabit.
I really do understand how the Bastille gets stormed - the elite become so out of touch and act with zero consequences that a rebalance becomes inevitable.
Returning sanity to immigration law will require something rather more than a lot of thought. It will require people with common sense and a moral code in Parliament and in our courts. No sign of that, so it is wishful thinking. A revolution is needed first to change the way everything is done, starting off with our electoral, education, policing and broadcasting systems. There is so much rottenness at the heart of Britain that its needs to be surgically removed.
I am curious to know if there is data on how many of these expert reports recommend that the person be deported. And since Dr Galappathie has been used twice whether there are statistics about how many times particular experts have been used and whether they show trends in the recommendations they produce.
I would think some FOIAs might be made to find this sort of thing out if they are not already public
Important research to do - but just to be clear the expert doesn’t recommend anything. They just assess, in this case, the level of risk of reoffending. The problem is really that judges too often defer to the expert and take his assessment at face value.
Consider me triggered to Attila the Hun level and beyond!
I’m sure there are plenty of other countries that are signatories to the Human Rights and Refugee Conventions which are rather more efficient in ejecting undesirables. But they probably haven’t made their legal systems subject to the hand-wringing of people with masters degrees in grievance studies.
The point that jumps out for me here is the outsourcing of responsibility to experts. This is a feature of the modern state and seems also to signal (as well as your point about reflected glory) a clear lack of moral confidence. Or at least a cowardly distancing from unpopular policies.
Definitely an element of that - it is something that became prominent in the Blair years and is a theme of Labour governments (Harold Wilson was a huge fan of experts).
Tony Blair's phrase "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" claimed that criminals weren't causing crime; external factors were. It's all 'agency' and 'informed consent' until someone is accused of a crime, after which they supposedly have no agency whatsoever, and are a pawn of said external factors. Since then, courts have been proxies for social workers.
Psychiatrists should never be working for defendants; they aren't defence lawyers.
If sociopathy is only caused by poverty or racism, it would follow that there are no white criminals who grew up in wealthy homes. And if only wealthy, white people have agency, it implies that others need to be shaped and controlled because they are incapable of making 'correct' decisions.
Therefore the economic security of the professional-managerial class is guaranteed, because the need for directing and cajoling supposedly inferior classes awarded victim status will never go away.
My belief is that sociopathy is mostly a learned behaviour with a potential genetic predisposition. It is passed down in familes, which with sufficient means will go into business or politics. Without those means, crime instead. However, with sufficient persuasion skills, a leader can amplify latent sociopathy among recruits, as we have seen many times.
Your critique of the immigration appeal system is incredibly valuable because it is precise and attentive to details of fact and law. You provide a big picture philosophical/theoretical take, but also a close reading of the details of individual cases, explaining points of law and process so clearly that a layman like myself can understand them.
This is far more helpful than the "lefty activist judge allows migrant to stay in UK because his son won't eat chicken nuggets" school of reporting that we find in the Telegraph and the Mail, because such reporting ultimately undermines itself by cherry picking the juicy detail that will have readers choking on their cornflakes and implying that the whole case hinges on that one detail (eg the chicken nuggets), which is generally not the case. Such reporting is ultimately misleading, and therefore dishonest, and can be dismissed as such by advocates of the current system. But there's really no need to over egg the pudding - the plain facts are outrageous enough, as you so valuably set out.
I would like to propose a change to the law. When a psychiatrist or other professional testifies that a convicted criminal is "no danger to the community", the professional should have skin in the game. Perhaps a £5,000 fine if the criminal offends again? No good, as many criminals could easily afford to pay such a fine. Maybe it would have to be prison, then. After all, if a person poses as a qualified psychiatrist and makes such a serious error, he has perhaps been guilty of false pretences. At the very least he should have all professional qualifications revoked so that he cannot do the same thing again.
Of course, making any legal decision based on the opinion of a psychiatrist is very dangerous.
That is an excellent idea. A fine of one twelfth of their previous year's declared income (i.e. a month - pretax) to be paid to the victim (if alive, or relatives if not).
The advantage of such a fine is that experts who submit hundreds of assessments are swiftly on the hook for several times their annual income and if it turns out they misjudged can be bankrupted, have all their assets seized and thrown in to prison and they can't pay. That strongly incentivizes them to not make this a major fraction of their business
Ideally, I suppose that the best principle would be to separate justice entirely from earning. Expert witnesses would not be paid. Of course that would necessitate speeding things up very much; an expert witness might be expected to give up a day of earnings as a civic duty, but not months.
However, in today's Western culture it seems hopeless to try to separate anything from money.
# Oh, it all makes work for the working man to do #
Like the old song, why would lawyers or judges be in favour of an obvious, easier process which doesn't involve them at all? Much as it would benefit the country, that is by no means their main concern ... exactly like our politicians.
And it’s amazing how many politicians are former lawyers…
Interestingly, an actual majority of senior Chinese politicians are qualified engineers or scientists. People who have made a living dealing with reality, whereas lawyers...
The whole Immigration Tribunal system and the rules it applies is the literal manifestation of a farce. The answer is to abolish it. All applications and appeals should be made from outside the UK. That would de-couple the Human Rights lawyers' gravy train from UK taxpayer funding.
Yes, I agree. Appeals etc. being outside the UK, perhaps in the individual's home country, is a good principle but it's not obvious how it would work in practice.
Would the miscreant have to appeal after deportation from the UK under the laws and procedures of their home country? If so, would we then have to pay for representation of the UK in, say, Bangladeshi courts? And what would happen if the judgement went against us?
It seems to me that the only civilised way is that we have to be firm and say once you're out you ain't coming back. And make sure all immigrants know this.
No, it would be like visa applications through the local British Embassy (which would only permit Mother Theresa and Albert Einstein types to succeed).
The practical issue is proper screening at the UK border: how do so many deportees simply wander back in? There is no proper system of screening or tracking overstayers.
If I had the job, I guarantee I'd devise a watertight system!! The Blob has no will to do this, staffed by Fifth Columnists as it is.
I'll be happy to recommend you for the job when the panocracy is up and running!
I reckon there are so many writers and commenters on Substack ( you included - I used to read Panocracy) who could run our country a million times better than the clowns currently in charge!
Thank you for your kind words. Panocracy will return as soon as I figure out how to use AI properly!
Mother Theresa is rather under a cloud at present.
Three thoughts. The acceptance of what I call the 'his mother didn't love him' style defence needs to be stopped. Secondly, if someone does face persecution in their home country the appropriate question is 'and?' Thirdly, whilst I agree, David, with your thoughts on the application of rules, I am very comfortable with the notion of one set for the nationals and another for foreigners; not in terms of establishing guilt, but in subsequent treatment. Homegrown criminals are, alas, a problem we are obliged to manage; foreign ones absolutely are not. Living here is a privilege not a right, no matter how shitty your home country.
I agree, and I think 80-90% of the public (including immigrants) would.
I also think the rot may have started when Insanity was a Special Verdict. Everyone and his dog pleads it.
Maybe if anyone who successfully pled insanity were detained for life in a secure institution...
Ah so now any offender can present a ‘hurt people hurt people’ defence and Judges melt with compassion and sympathy.
How is it that this country, with a rich history of deporting its own criminals 250+ years ago, can’t stomach deporting foreigners? As a foreigner, I find this maddening.
Hypertrophied compassion, I think, is the main culprit.
This makes depressing reading. Most depressing though, is the question of how a malfunctioning system is corrected. The individuals who would be charged with doing so would also be the products of the dysfunctional systems that causes these absurd judgements, and hence would likely make it worse. I am not aware of one single person, in any field whatsoever who displays the capacity to see the problem, define the problem, set out a solution to the problem and implement that steps required to reach the solution. I do not think, though I may be wrong, that collapse of our society, caused by foxes, can be restored by foxes so we will have to wait for a lion to appear.
The crown of France is lying in the gutter waiting for somebody to pick it up on the tip of his sword.
I couldn't agree more, David.
I also find it hard to understand that there can be an appeal to the Upper Tribunal, which reviews the case and decides that the decision of the First Tier Tribunal was wrong; and yet the case is sent back to the First Tier Tribunal for yet another review. Why is the appeal not simply successful, allowing the Home Office to go ahead and deport?
Looks to me like a seriously flawed process, quite apart from the way it is being applied.
In defence of the process, it’s because there couldn’t be a finding of fact by the Upper Tribunal - the facts the First Tier Tribunal relied on were flawed so the whole thing needs to be redone with a new factual assessment (which the Upper Tribunal can’t do). All well and good until you remember there’s a backlog of at least 90,000 cases….
Except that the Upper Tribunal did do a factual assessment in order to conclude that the assessment of the First Tier Tribunal was wrong. The whole process is ridiculous. If you appeal successfully against a conviction for theft, for example, the Appeal Court doesn't order a retrial. It clears you.
I know what you mean, but strictly speaking the Upper Tribunal didn't do a factual assessment of its own. It isn't in a position to do that. It just looked at whether the First Tier Tribunal had erred without making a fresh finding.
One wonders if there would be different rulings if the judges of the First Tier Tribunal were made to live, with their families, in communities with large numbers of immigrants. We could billet politicians there while we're at it and see if they change their minds about human rights law.
These rulings, and other aspects of our political culture, represent a society where the ruling class has little or no direct contact with the masses, but imposes a highly politicised understanding of the law on them based on abstract notions of universal care and fundamental human goodness that have no logical or empirical basis.
Essentially, we live in a kind of secular theocracy in which the clerics who make and enforce the laws are cloistered away, living the good life, while the laity bears the consequences of their luxury beliefs, and are damned for blasphemy and heresy when they complain.
The electoral process will in the end, I think, ultimately bring about a course correction.
The more I think about things, the more I think we are just at the end of a long 1,000 year cycle and have lived for so long with the fruits of a high trust society we are as vulnerable as the Dodo was.
Look into the recent Mail article on the huge mega mosque being built in the Lake District and the opinions of the people their - they already know the people protesting are racist. Case closed. A comfortably certain world they inhabit.
I really do understand how the Bastille gets stormed - the elite become so out of touch and act with zero consequences that a rebalance becomes inevitable.
You're not the only one to feel that way!
Returning sanity to immigration law will require something rather more than a lot of thought. It will require people with common sense and a moral code in Parliament and in our courts. No sign of that, so it is wishful thinking. A revolution is needed first to change the way everything is done, starting off with our electoral, education, policing and broadcasting systems. There is so much rottenness at the heart of Britain that its needs to be surgically removed.
I am curious to know if there is data on how many of these expert reports recommend that the person be deported. And since Dr Galappathie has been used twice whether there are statistics about how many times particular experts have been used and whether they show trends in the recommendations they produce.
I would think some FOIAs might be made to find this sort of thing out if they are not already public
Important research to do - but just to be clear the expert doesn’t recommend anything. They just assess, in this case, the level of risk of reoffending. The problem is really that judges too often defer to the expert and take his assessment at face value.
I feel sick. I've only just heard the term toxic empathy, but this is operating here. Oh and good old fashioned greed.
Toxic empathy indeed!
Consider me triggered to Attila the Hun level and beyond!
I’m sure there are plenty of other countries that are signatories to the Human Rights and Refugee Conventions which are rather more efficient in ejecting undesirables. But they probably haven’t made their legal systems subject to the hand-wringing of people with masters degrees in grievance studies.
I do know that most European countries deport people at two or three times the rate we do....
The point that jumps out for me here is the outsourcing of responsibility to experts. This is a feature of the modern state and seems also to signal (as well as your point about reflected glory) a clear lack of moral confidence. Or at least a cowardly distancing from unpopular policies.
Definitely an element of that - it is something that became prominent in the Blair years and is a theme of Labour governments (Harold Wilson was a huge fan of experts).
Tony Blair's phrase "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" claimed that criminals weren't causing crime; external factors were. It's all 'agency' and 'informed consent' until someone is accused of a crime, after which they supposedly have no agency whatsoever, and are a pawn of said external factors. Since then, courts have been proxies for social workers.
Psychiatrists should never be working for defendants; they aren't defence lawyers.
There is a lot of academic work on ‘therapeutic jurisprudence’ and the role of experts, a lot of it pretty insightful.
If sociopathy is only caused by poverty or racism, it would follow that there are no white criminals who grew up in wealthy homes. And if only wealthy, white people have agency, it implies that others need to be shaped and controlled because they are incapable of making 'correct' decisions.
Therefore the economic security of the professional-managerial class is guaranteed, because the need for directing and cajoling supposedly inferior classes awarded victim status will never go away.
My belief is that sociopathy is mostly a learned behaviour with a potential genetic predisposition. It is passed down in familes, which with sufficient means will go into business or politics. Without those means, crime instead. However, with sufficient persuasion skills, a leader can amplify latent sociopathy among recruits, as we have seen many times.
Your critique of the immigration appeal system is incredibly valuable because it is precise and attentive to details of fact and law. You provide a big picture philosophical/theoretical take, but also a close reading of the details of individual cases, explaining points of law and process so clearly that a layman like myself can understand them.
This is far more helpful than the "lefty activist judge allows migrant to stay in UK because his son won't eat chicken nuggets" school of reporting that we find in the Telegraph and the Mail, because such reporting ultimately undermines itself by cherry picking the juicy detail that will have readers choking on their cornflakes and implying that the whole case hinges on that one detail (eg the chicken nuggets), which is generally not the case. Such reporting is ultimately misleading, and therefore dishonest, and can be dismissed as such by advocates of the current system. But there's really no need to over egg the pudding - the plain facts are outrageous enough, as you so valuably set out.
Totally agree. That kind of reporting is useful in highlighting the issue but does a total disservice to the complexities usually involved.
I would like to propose a change to the law. When a psychiatrist or other professional testifies that a convicted criminal is "no danger to the community", the professional should have skin in the game. Perhaps a £5,000 fine if the criminal offends again? No good, as many criminals could easily afford to pay such a fine. Maybe it would have to be prison, then. After all, if a person poses as a qualified psychiatrist and makes such a serious error, he has perhaps been guilty of false pretences. At the very least he should have all professional qualifications revoked so that he cannot do the same thing again.
Of course, making any legal decision based on the opinion of a psychiatrist is very dangerous.
That is an excellent idea. A fine of one twelfth of their previous year's declared income (i.e. a month - pretax) to be paid to the victim (if alive, or relatives if not).
The advantage of such a fine is that experts who submit hundreds of assessments are swiftly on the hook for several times their annual income and if it turns out they misjudged can be bankrupted, have all their assets seized and thrown in to prison and they can't pay. That strongly incentivizes them to not make this a major fraction of their business
Ideally, I suppose that the best principle would be to separate justice entirely from earning. Expert witnesses would not be paid. Of course that would necessitate speeding things up very much; an expert witness might be expected to give up a day of earnings as a civic duty, but not months.
However, in today's Western culture it seems hopeless to try to separate anything from money.