Nicholas Reed Langen

Last month, the Upper Tribunal for Immigration and Asylum granted six displaced Palestinians entry into the UK to stay with a British family member. After their home in Gaza was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike, the family, anonymised by the court for their own protection, took refuge at the al-Mawasi ‘humanitarian zone’. From there, in January 2024, they applied for entry to the UK. The Home Office rejected their application and the First-Tier Immigration Tribunal dismissed their appeal. On further appeal, the Upper Tribunal reversed the decision, with the two immigration judges holding that the family, who faced ‘a high risk of death or injury’ if they remained in Gaza, were entitled to come to the UK under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the right to family life. According to the prime minister, this judgment was ‘wrong’.

Under English common law, you have no duty to act. An ordinary person cannot be held liable for something that happened because they chose to do nothing. If you are walking beside a lake on a summer evening, hear cries of ‘help!’ and notice a swimmer flailing their arms, you are under no legal obligation to do anything. You do not have to call for help or throw them a lifebuoy, let alone dive into the water to save them. You could idle on the shore and watch them slip beneath the surface, for all an English court would hold you accountable. This principle applies not only to ordinary citizens, but also to those explicitly charged with the protection of the public. The police and other emergency services are under no special obligation to act. If a police officer stood by and watched the swimmer drown, the courts would come to the same conclusion – so long as the officer didn’t make the situation worse.

It isn’t only on the economy that Labour is aping the Conservative Party. In May this year, the High Court ruled that the protest regulations enacted by Suella Braverman when she was home secretary were unlawful.

‘The Rwanda bill is a legal fiction that makes the law look like an ass,’ Lord Anderson KC said in the final debate on the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill in the House of Lords on Monday, ‘and those who make it, asses.’ Shortly afterwards, the Lords, which had sent amendments back to the Commons again and again and seen them rebuffed each time, passed the bill. The Commons won the game of parliamentary ping-pong, and Rwanda became a ‘safe country’ in the eyes of British law.

Officially, Brook House is not a prison, and no one is kept there because they have been convicted of a crime and sentenced by a court. Instead, it houses more than five hundred men who have been found – or are suspected – to be in the country illegally, and are due to be deported. In theory, no one is supposed to reside there for any meaningful length of time. Legislation restricts the use of IRCs (Brook House is one of ten across the UK) to holding those whose deportation is ‘imminent’. But people are routinely detained in IRCs for weeks or months.