Hijack

The Home Secretary, John Reid, has always taken a refreshingly flexible approach to stuffy legalisms. A few months ago, as Secretary of State for Bombing, he lamented those aspects of international law which were hamstringing the UK and its allies by implying that torture, imprisonment without trial and pre-emptive strikes against non-threatening states are somehow legally dubious, or possibly even unlawful - and this despite the unrelenting moral passion displayed by Reid's master Tony, and Tony's master George, in their efforts to spread peace and democracy around the globe. Reid also noted the crying need for legislation to deal with "something none of us are thinking about at the moment", a warning which seems to have gone sadly unheeded by world leaders struggling to cope with the merely conceivable.

Now, as Secretary of State for Internal Security, Reid is hampered by the namby-pamby, Old Labour attitudes of the British judiciary. Like nurses who believe that hospitals are for treating people rather than making profits, or transport industry consumers who believe that railways are for getting people from place to place rather than making profits, or anti-democratic activists who believe that the House of Lords is for representing the people rather than making profits, Britain's judges have been consistent in showing themselves badly behind the times. The appeal court has just upheld the right of nine Afghans, who hijacked an aeroplane to get into the country, to "remain, work and enjoy other freedoms in the UK".

Obviously, this is outrageous. The idea that a Home Secretary should have to deal with, of all things, asylum seekers in accordance with the laws of his own country, rather than simply disposing of them according to his Tony-inspired whim, is a concept that has baffled, in succession, Jack Straw, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke and, now, the estimable Reid himself. Worse, the case provoked a "public outcry"; or, in Oldspeak, a few squeals of indignation from the tabloids. Reid, however, has the solution: "I therefore intend to legislate at the earliest opportunity to take new powers to deny people in this position leave to remain." This will certainly help; but how unfortunate that the judges have made such measures necessary by applying existing laws in such an unimaginative, unhelpful and ministerially non-empowering fashion.