We held a small party to celebrate the news that the UK had seen its largest rise in population in 50 years: a jump of 1 per cent in only 12 months to a respectable total of 68.3 million people. Just crisps and soft drinks, you understand. Nothing wildly extravagant. All patriots feel proud of the speed with which our numbers have been rising of late, because naturally we wish for the UK to be the biggest and best in the world – and we are on our way.
The rights of the likes of Ardit outweigh the rights of the rest of us not to be burgled
At the current rate of increase, the populations of Turkey, Iran and Thailand could be surpassed within a dozen or so years, although we have a way to go before we catch up with the real big boys, like Bangladesh. Our canny policy of allowing into the country anybody who wants to come, especially if they are from some maniacal, fly-blown, Stone-Age-desert theocracy and would quite like to kill us, is paying dividends. Ever onwards and upwards.
There was also the associated good news that Ardit Binaj is a small, but important, part of that 68.3 million – because for a while it looked as if we were going to lose him. Rescued just in the nick of time by the dependable European Convention on Human Rights, Ardit, aged 32, is Albanian and has been a most industrious member of the UK’s flourishing burgling community, with a string of convictions for breaking into homes and making the lives of those who live in them miserable and frightened. He had been due to be deported to Albania since, on balance, we believed that he had given enough of himself to the British people these past few years; but his lawyers lodged an appeal with the courts on the grounds that he had a right to a family life in this country. Ardit, you see, has a wife and we have cause to feel especially blessed, as this couple have recently brought into the world a baby son. It is to be hoped that little Ardit Jr is already familiarising himself with a jemmy. If burglars still use jemmies.
There is no war in Albania. It is a country more at peace with itself than at any time since good ol’ King Zog was on the throne. Its standard of living may be a little lower than ours, but I don’t suppose that situation will last terribly long, seeing as we are importing their entire criminal class plus a healthy proportion of their charming and agreeable beggars. Ardit came here because our houses have more valuable stuff in them on average, thus making his noble trade much more lucrative.
His appeal succeeded under Article 8 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, the crucial bit of which I shall quote. It states that every individual has a right to respect for his or her private life and adds: ‘There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.’
The question which naturally occurs is this: were the lawyers representing the Crown in this particular case as thick as a plate of mince? How the hell did they lose that one? Did they miss the bit about being ‘in accordance with the law’ and the later reference to the ‘prevention of disorder or crime’? The convention seems to me very clear that Ardit’s rights are rendered null and void by the convictions occasioned as he pursued his chosen trade. And this is a problem, because it is clearly not the convention per se which is the obstacle to removing Ardit from our lives for ever, but the fantastically deluded judges who interpret the convention to mean that nobody should ever be sent anywhere they don’t want to go, wholly regardless of what crimes they have committed.
The rights of Ardit outweigh the rights of the rest of us not to be burgled. Or perhaps, in other cases, stabbed, raped, beaten up etc. It is this idiocy, of course, which has convinced the electorate in Europe (although sadly not here) that liberals are not merely amusingly stupid, but rather
dangerous, and that they will not vote for them any more.
Here, though, even more than abroad, the debate has been stifled and so the population rises ever more. Object to the current utterly ruinous levels of inward migration – which, incidentally, the Office for National Statistics stated was by far the main cause for the recent big increase – and you are considered a xenophobe and a pitiless racist. Advance the argument that, for example, we ought to do a little more to stop the arrival here of those boats from Calais, and the massed ovine bleat will go up: ‘But they’re Yuman Beans!’ The fact that we all know this and that, actually it is the whole nub of the issue – because if they weren’t yuman beans, but were instead potatoes, then it wouldn’t matter very much as they wouldn’t need houses – carries no weight.
Mysteriously, the hundreds of thousands arriving both illegally and legally each year do not impose stresses upon our infrastructure or greatly exacerbate the housing crisis, and it is defamation to propose that they might perhaps be responsible for increasing the crime rate. Suggest any of that and you’re a far-right, mean-minded bigot – even though it is quite patently true. And seeing as nobody wants to be called a far-right, mean-minded bigot, we all keep our mouths shut and the arrivals keep on a-coming.
Comments