Bill Carmichael: When rights are so wrong

But surely even the most blinkered progressive can see the Act is not only absurdly unfair, but poses a very real danger to the British public.

Take just one example this week – the case of Siraj Yassin Abdullah Ali, an Eritrean convicted of helping an al-Qaida cell plot bomb attacks on London tube trains and buses, just two weeks after 52 people were murdered in the 7/7 atrocities.

It was bad enough that Ali was released midway through his already ridiculously lenient sentence, but to add insult to injury, activist judges have now ruled he cannot be deported, because to do so would infringe his human rights. So now we have an unrepentant and unreformed convicted terrorist, who plotted to murder hundreds of innocent people, and who is considered by the authorities to be of the highest possible risk to the public, free in our midst.

He was pictured last weekend travelling on buses and tube trains without supervision.

We must be stark, staring mad.

Apparently, a number of his fellow 21/7 plotters are also fighting deportation to their native countries by using the Human Rights Act. The way things are going they’ll soon be able to reform their terror cell and carry on where they left off, and there is little we can about it. Maybe next time their bombs will explode properly?

No other country in the world, including fellow signatories to the European Convention of Human Rights, would allow such a situation to continue.

In Germany, France or Italy, Ali would be packed off on the first plane home.

That’s because in those countries even the most left-wing judges are sensible enough to balance the “rights” of would-be killers, against the safety of law abiding citizens, and to come down on the side of sanity.

Our judges simply can’t be trusted to do the same – and that’s why the Act has to go, to be replaced by a British Bill of Rights.

David Cameron was elected on the back of a firm commitment to do exactly that and he should use the Ali case to fulfill his promise without delay.

And if Clegg and those cheering Lib Dems want to collapse the coalition and fight an election on the basis of allowing foreign terrorists the right to stay in the UK on benefits, then let them.

Rather their funeral than ours.

Bad business

THE party conference season always produces its fair share of daft policy ideas seemingly dreamt up on the train up from London and jotted down on the back of an envelope.

Firmly in the “did he really say that?” category was Ed Miliband’s barmy idea for the Government to categorise good and bad businesses, and to reward the former and punish the latter.

Isn’t that what customers do? And is there the remotest chance that some new quango would do it any more effectively?

But the prize for the most bonkers idea of the autumn definitely goes to Labour’s shadow culture secretary Ivan Lewis, who proposed a national licensing scheme for journalists who could be “struck off” if they misbehaved.

Set aside for a moment the sheer impracticality of such a scheme in the era of globalization, blogs and citizen journalism.

The key objection is that allowing only government-approved journalists to work as reporters is inimical to a free society. It is the sort of thing that happens in North Korea and Iran.

And it’s another good reason to make sure left-wing authoritarians like Lewis never get their hands on power.