Minister defends Tory deputy chair over sweary ‘back to France’ jibe about migrants unhappy with barges – UK politics live | Politics

The Andrew Malkinson miscarriage of justice story has highlighted two anomalies with the system by which victims in these cases receive – or do not receive – compensation.

One was the surprise revelation that victims of miscarriage of justice could have money deducted from their compensation payment to cover their living costs while in jail. Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, has scrapped this rule, and this morning said this might be backdated (which in theory would allow three people who did lose out because of this to get their money back). See 11.17am.

The other relates to the threshold for getting compensation. Partly as a result of a law passed in 2014, prisoners who have a conviction quashed do not qualify for compensation unless new evidence shows “beyond reasonable doubt” that they did not commit the offence. There have been calls for this rule to be changed too, on the grounds that it is unfair.

But in his Today interview this morning Chalk signalled that he was opposed to changing this rule. He said that if he lowered this threshold, that would lead to people who were clearly guilty, but who were freed on a technicality, getting compensation. He said:

Let me give you two quick examples. I remember a case back 10 years ago now, horrible GBH in a pub, someone had their hands nearly severed, two people convicted, they went into custody and so on.

And yet, whilst they’re in custody, it emerged that the indictment, that’s to say the charge sheet upon which they had been tried, was defective because it hadn’t been signed. And as a result, the court of appeal, I think the supreme court, decided to quash those convictions and they were released.

Now, is it right in those circumstances, where there’s no doubt, everyone knows that they committed the crime, that they should be entitled £100,000.

Or what about terrorists who have been convicted, and yet it emerges after their conviction that the state gave an undertaking that they wouldn’t be prosecuted, and therefore the convictions are quashed as an abuse of process?

What happened when Bibby Stockholm used to house asylum seekers in Netherlands

Ashifa Kassam

Long before it was docked in Dorset, the Bibby Stockholm was used by the Netherlands to also house asylum-seekers.

While the barge has since been refurbished, its use in Rotterdam in the early 2000s sparked complaints over the cramped accommodation and poor living conditions of those onboard.

In 2006 a reporter with the Dutch Magazine Vrij Nederland went undercover as a security guard on the barge. At the time, 472 asylum seekers were living on the boat. Nederland said it was like a jail.

He wrote:

Calling the prisoners ‘inhabitants’ and the cells ‘rooms’ seems like a bad joke. People are packed here on top of each other. The ceilings on the boat are low and the corridors so narrow that it’s hard not to bump into each other. The four-person cells are inhumanely small, no larger than twenty square metres. It’s stuffy and there’s not much light coming in.

His observations were echoed in a 2008 report by Amnesty International, in which a 32-year-old asylum seeker told the campaign group that conditions on the boat were “very difficult”. The asylum seeker quoted in the report went on:

There were four people in a cell, which caused frequent fights over the use of the television, cleaning the cell and the noise. There is only a little daylight in the cells, which makes reading difficult. Moreover, the ventilation in the small cell is insufficient to keep the cell fresh; when someone went to the toilet the smell would fill the whole cell. In the morning the guards would open the cell with their nose covered to protect themselves against the stench which filled the cell overnight.

The Netherlands eventually stopped using the barge following the opening of new facilities for asylum seekers.

In June of this year, a Home Office spokesperson said the Bibby Stockholm had “completed a statutory inspection and refurbishment”.

Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, has said he is “considering” backdating new rules which mean that wrongly convicted people will no longer have prison living costs deducted from their compensation payments, PA Media reports. PA says:

The minister made the reform with immediate effect on Sunday after the outrage sparked by the miscarriage of justice case centring on Andrew Malkinson.

Malkinson, who spent 17 years in prison for a rape he did not commit, had his conviction quashed after DNA linking another man to the crime was produced.

The 57-year-old quickly expressed concern that the rules meant expenses could be deducted from any compensation payment he may be awarded to cover the costs of his jail term.

In response, Chalk updated the guidance dating back to 2006 to remove them from future payments made under the miscarriage of justice compensation scheme.

Speaking to broadcasters this morning, he suggested he may go further by backdating the change after Malkinson and Sir Bob Neill, the Tory MP who chairs the Commons justice committee, called for wider reform.

He told BBC One’s Breakfast programme: “Certainly since 2006 there have been three cases where deductions have been made, and none in the last 10 years.

“Of those three cases, the reductions from their compensation award have been 3% and 6% so it’s important to get some perspective.

“There’s also issues around the public interest, about retrospectivity – normally there’s a rule that says you shouldn’t make rules retrospective but I’m considering this all in the round.”

Yesterday 15 asylum seekers were moved to the Bibby Stockholm barge in Portland, but dozens more who were due to go there had their transfer postponed because of legal action. We don’t know the full details of the legal arguments involved, but the Care4Calais, the refugee charity helping many of the migrants, said people who were disabled, who had survived torture and who had had a traumatic experience of being at sea, were among those objecting to being housed on the barge.

According to a report by Charles Hymas in the Daily Telegraph, Suella Braverman, the home secretary, is threatening to withdraw accommodation from asylum seekers who refuse to move to the barge without a reasonable excuse. He quotes a government source saying:

Anyone refusing to move without a reasonable excuse has 24 hours to reconsider, after which their asylum support will cease and they will have to fend for themselves.

In his Today interview this morning Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, was asked if it would be legal to leave migrants homeless in this way. He said that ultimately this would be a matter for the courts to consider, but he said it was “unlikely” that this would be ruled illegal.

He said that accommodation on the barge was “basic”. But it was “perfectly safe” and “perfectly decent”, and it was “not unreasonable” for the government to say asylum seekers should have to live there, he said.

He explained:

If people were therefore told, ‘Right, if you don’t want to come on the barge, that’s it, the state has discharged its duty to you’. You’re putting to me, would that be an illegal position? Would that be an unlawful stance to take? My position is it’s unlikely that would be unlawful. In other words, I suspect that would be lawful. But that would have to be considered in the normal way.

As the first asylum seekers moved into the Bibby Stockholm barge at Portland, many charities and campaigners (see here, here and here, for example) complained about the conditions in which they were being housed.

In an interview with the Daily Express, Lee Anderson, the Conservative deputy chairman, delivered a characteristically blunt response. He told the paper:

If they don’t like barges, then they should fuck off back to France …

I think people have just had enough.

These people come across the Channel in small boats. If they don’t like the conditions they are housed in here then they should go back to France or better not come at all in the first place.

Asked on LBC if Anderson was speaking on behalf of the party, Chalk defended what he said, arguing that his Tory colleague was expressing the “righteous indignation of the British people”. Chalk said:

Lee Anderson expresses the righteous indignation of the British people. Yeah, he does it in salty terms and that’s his style. But his indignation is well placed.

People are coming from a safe country. France is a signatory to the European convention on human rights, and people should claim asylum in the first country. It shouldn’t be like a sort of open shopping list of where you want to go.

So he expresses himself in his characteristically robust terms, but there is a lot of sense, in my respectful view, in what Lee says.

On the Today programme Nick Robinson, the presenter, reminded Chalk that after Brexit he said that Britain should be a “tolerant, outward-facing nation” and that he did not want to see a return of “the kind of ugly bigotry that I thought we had left long behind”. Asked if what Anderson said was the language of a tolerant and outward-facing nation, Chalk replied:

I think that this is absolutely fine. I have no difficulty with that. It’s not bigotry at all.

This country, lest we forget, has offered its home to 400,000 people since 2015: Ukrainians, people from Hong Kong, Afghans. We are an open and warm and outward-facing country.

But equally we’re a country that believes in fairness and playing by the rules, and those who don’t play by the rules, who don’t take advantage of those opportunities we provide, and try to jump the queue, rightly cause indignation. And I think Lee was expressing that indignation in his own way, but there was nothing unreasonable in principle about what he was saying.

Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, has been giving interviews this morning to promote the announcement about the “professional enablers taskforce”, the group set up to facilitate enforcement action against what Suella Braverman calls “crooked immigration lawyers”. (See 9.11am.) In an interview with Today, Chalk said there was a difference between the lawyers who are knowingly helping people make false claims and those who were helping asylum seekers with legitimate claims.

Asked if the government was criticising the lawyers who launched the legal challenges that prevented some migrants being moved to the Bibby Stockholm barge yesterday. Chalk said what they were doing was legitimate. He said:

You are absolutely right to draw a distinction.

People who are making stuff up deserve, frankly, the full force of the law, the law should come down like a ton of bricks.

Yes, the government is frustrated, of course, by legal challenges. Those legal challenges aren’t improper of themselves, but we will be challenging them because we take the view that they are misguided, they are wrongheaded, they are last-minute, they are … completely misconceived.

(Many lawyers believe that a lot of the “lefty lawyer” rhetoric from senior ministers in recent years, including Braverman and Rishi Sunak, does elide the distinction between corrupt solicitors, and the majority working on immigration cases honestly and professionally, and that this is deliberate.)

Although Chalk said that he was not criticising lawyers for pursuing legitimate claims, he claimed that recently lawyers have become increasingly political. This was regrettable, he said.

The strong tradition of lawyers in this country is that you simply act for your client without fear or favour, and you don’t necessarily associate yourself with that cause.

But I think it is fair to point out that in the last 10 years there has been a growing, and I think regrettable, trend for lawyers to actively parade their politics and to identify more with their clients. And if they can avoid that, they should avoid it.

It’s much better, I think, for lawyers in the main to keep their politics to themselves and to simply do the job on behalf of the clients.

But some seem to be much more willing, and indeed almost enthusiastic, about parading their political opposition. I think that’s a mistake.

In his Today programme interview David McNeill, head of public affairs at the Law Society, argued that the problem with the asylum system was not false claims, but the backlog of applications caused by delays in dealing with them. He told the programme:

Most asylum claims are successful. Those claims which are unsuccessful go to appeal; over half are granted on appeal. There’s something fundamentally wrong with this system.

He also said the Illegal Migration Act would make the situation worse. Describing it as a “really flawed piece of legislation”, he said:

On a practical level the government doesn’t have sufficient number of places in secure accommodation and the plan is to put everybody in secure accommodation for 28 days.

It doesn’t have sufficient numbers of return agreements with other countries such as Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, so actually even if you wanted to return asylum seekers it can’t because there isn’t a return agreement.

So what they are going to create is a new group of this 50,000 in hotels, basically a new group of asylum seekers in legal limbo, and it will just make the situation worse.

Good morning. It’s day two of what is down on the No 10 grid as “small boats week” and this morning the government is publicising the existence of the “professional enablers taskforce”, a group set up to beef up enforcement action taken against lawyers who knowingly help migrants make false immigration claims. The taskforce has been running for a while now, but the Home Office has decided to promote it today, with a press release quoting Suella Braverman, the home secretary, saying:

Crooked immigration lawyers must be rooted out and brought to justice. While the majority of lawyers act with integrity – we know that some are lying to help illegal migrants game the system. It is not right or fair on those who play by the rules.

Aubrey Allegretti has written up the story for the Guardian here.

But the story is getting the biggest show in the Daily Mail, which is particularly interested in the topic of “crooked immigration lawyers” because they recently published an investigation that led to the Solicitors Regulation Authority closing three law firms where there was evidence (obtained undercover by the Mail) exposing lawyers or legal advisers telling someone posing as an economic migrant how to fabricate a story that might allow them to successfully claim asylum.

Lawyers accept that conduct of the kind exposed by the Daily Mail is wrong, and that the perpetrators should be punished. But the government has been criticised this morning for presenting this as part of a wider crusade against “leftie lawyers”.

David McNeill, head of public affairs at the Law Society, told the Today programme this morning:

It’s not in our interest to have any solicitor acting improperly or crookedly, but this announcement today is something of a red herring.

This task force which they tout with such aggressive language has been in existence for months now so really from our perspective it just looks like a bit of lawyer-bashing as a distraction from really bad news for the government on the number of asylum seekers now accommodated in hotels, 50,000, problems with processing asylum claims – the backlog is continuing to be extremely bad with cases taking over a year – and also the quality of the case work.

McNeill’s argument was broadly endorsed by Lord Garnier, a Conservative peer and former solicitor general. He was also on on the Today programme and, asked what he thought of government rhetoric about lawyers, he replied:

Attacking judges, attacking lawyers, purely for political rhetoric is a waste of time, and I’ve said as much on the floor of the House of Lords.

I’ve been accused of many things but one thing I’ve not been accused of being a lefty lawyer, but I do believe in the rule of law. And if people would concentrate on what they’re supposed to be doing, rather than deflect by attacking others, we might have a rather more productive set of affairs.

Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, has been defending the government’s stance in an interview round. I will post his comments shortly.

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