The Continuing Risk

If Brown gets his way, we'll have no power to deport dangerous aliens.

By Christopher Booker

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From the shambles engulfing our waste disposal to the fiasco of Home Information Packs, a regular theme of this blog has been the difficulty that so many politicians and journalists seem to have in grasping how much of the way we are ruled is dictated by our new system of government centred in Brussels.

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Yet another example was the confusion that so many commentators got into last week over Britain's inability to deport Learco Chindamo, who murdered Philip Lawrence, a headmaster, outside his school gates in 1995.

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Most of the media (and the Tory party) rushed to blame this on the Human Rights Act, when careful study of the judge's ruling would have shown that the realcause of our Government's impotence was an EU directive, 2004/58, on the "free movement of peoples".

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The EU law presents us with a wonderful Catch-22. We are allowed to deport a criminal such as Chindamo if he poses a continuing risk to the public, but he can only be deported once he has been let out of prison. And, in law, the very act of letting him out of prison means that he is no longer deemed to be a risk. Ergo, there is no way in which such a man can be deported.

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In fact our powerlessness to decide who is or is not allowed to live in thiscountry will become even more acute if Gordon Brown gets his way in railroadingthrough the EU treaty he is so keen on.One of the many provisions of the treaty that have not yet attracted the noticethey deserve is Article 69 (copied, like almost everything else in it, from therejected constitution which Mr Brown insists was something totally different).

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Article 69 obliges the EU to abolish "any controls on persons, whatever their nationality, when crossing internal borders". In other words, once someone hasentered any of the 27 countries making up the EU, it will become illegal to prevent them from entering any other EU country, regardless of their nationality.

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So if millions of Turks or Russians or Somalis somehow manage to enter any part of the EU, the British Government will no longer have any right to stop them entering Britain and staying here.

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Mr Brown may think this is a sensible way for us to be governed. But it is hardly surprising that he does not want the wishes of the rest of us to beconsulted in a referendum, since he must know that few of us would be likely to agree with him.