The anger generated by the asylum issue has now been turned, in the hands of the Mail and its cohorts, into a stick with which to beat Britain's human rights laws. In the Sun, Richard Littlejohn wrote, on 20 February 2003, that the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) is 'one of the most wicked pieces of legislation ever brought into British law... little more than a charter for terrorists, gangsters, illegal immigrants, drugs dealers'.
Similarly, a pamphlet by Myles Harris, published in January by the right-wing think-tank Civitas, entitled Tomorrow Is Another Country, and extracted in the Mail on 21 January 2003, argues that Britain should cease its membership of the ECHR. Harris' theme is that Britain's doors are open by law to all who seek entry chanting the mantra of human rights. His message is that we are being overrun by foreign frauds, cheats and liars, and there is nothing we can do about it while the Human Rights Act remains in force. Therefore it must be repealed.
But while the Mail describes Harris as a man who has been 'researching the asylum crisis', in fact, he has sat in on a few asylum appeal hearings and his report is a hodgepodge of factual and legal error, prejudice, assumption and partiality. He tells his readers that 'only 9 per cent of men and 13 per cent of women are granted asylum; the rest present cases which are concocted or have only the vaguest approximation to the truth'. Yet, any fair reading of Home Office statistics shows that at least 42 per cent of claims are valid, when successful appeals and exceptional leave to remain are included. He tells his readers that 'the Human Rights Act has the effect of surrendering the right to decide who can and who can't enter the UK'. Yet, as he ought to know, the European Court of Human Rights recognises the sovereign right of states to control their borders. He even tells his readers that 'by 2050, whites will be in the minority in London and, by 2100, in the entire country', though projections of that kind wrongly assume that descendants of immigrants will have as many children as immigrants do.
The funniest part of the Harris polemic is where he describes how we can avoid employing immigrant labour. We need, he says, to raise the retirement age to 70, curb social security and work longer hours. Strange how those proposals weren't headlined.
http://www.irr.org.uk/2003/march/ak000003.html
