It wasn’t surprising that the Home Office chose to back an urgent appeal in the Epping hotel case. Not only were its asylum arrangements in tatters as a result of Mr Justice Eyre’s decision last week: more important, the deadline of 12 September set by the court to stop the use of the Bell Hotel in Essex as a migrant centre on planning grounds faced it with a potential logistical nightmare. If more authorities followed the Epping line, things could have got exponentially worse.
Legally, the Home Office has won; politically, its victory could be remarkably Pyrrhic
The Court of Appeal’s discharge of the interim injunction this afternoon gives the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper welcome breathing-space. She can also take some comfort from the judgment itself. Although the grounds were partly based on technical mismanagement by Epping, the court also suggested that in deciding whether to grant an injunction little weight should be given to the presence of protesters, since this created a perverse incentive to protest, and that the Home Office’s duty to accommodate asylum seekers needed to be taken very seriously. Both reasons make other injunctions like that granted in Epping harder, though not necessarily impossible, to get.
Longer term, however, the government could end up bitterly regretting its intervention. Legally it has won; politically its victory could be remarkably Pyrrhic.
To begin with, by having the injunction lifted it has perversely deprived itself of a golden opportunity to put a swift end to the use of migrant hotels and thus defuse the protests against them. If the injunction had remained, Cooper could have seen off left-wing parliamentary opposition by referring to her duty to obey the law. She now can’t. The migrant hotels crisis, and the demonstrations outside those hotels that have caused much of what is left of the government’s popularity in Middle England to collapse, will meanwhile continue.
The whole affair has been a public relations disaster for Labour. One obvious point was picked up yesterday. Through her lawyers, Cooper was constrained to say in court what she would never have dared to say to a voter outside it: that, as the Times put it, ‘the need to meet the human rights of asylum seekers by housing them in hotels outweighs safety concerns of local families.’
To just-about-managing people in Middle England, this will, to put it mildly, not go down well. The apparent preference for the interests of irregular migrants over local families is precisely what has been driving large numbers of the latter, exasperated, into the arms of Reform: Labour’s recent performance will in all likelihood augment the stampede.
Nor is it only the human rights issue. The government’s argument in the Court of Appeal also involved the idea that what would otherwise be breaches of planning law might quietly be condoned, at least to the extent of having the courts refusing an injunction to stop them, where necessary to promote central government policy.
This of itself is unattractive to any decent voter, not to mention the fact that there is a distinct whiff of two-tier justice here. But then add to the mixture the fact that the policy concerned is the housing close to working-class communities of large numbers of would-be migrants with nothing to do, and in some cases, doubtful respect for either the law or the customs of their desired host country. Do that, and dislike is likely to turn to fury and, in the end, electoral disaster.
And that is before you get to the matter of localism. Many of the functions of local authorities are fairly mechanical: but one area where they are expected very much to reflect the views of local people is planning. If one thing is clear, Epping Forest Council were acting on the basis of very strong local feeling in taking the proceedings they did; the same went for the others thinking of following its example. Yet an essential part of the message of the government in arguing its case was that local concerns were all very well, but had to be overridden in the national interest once the grown-ups from central government arrived. For those whose standard of life can depend closely on how far their local authority can take steps to look after their interests and preserve the environment they live in, the optics are not good.
The asylum hotels affair is by no means over yet. Technically today’s decision was only about interim relief. The Epping case comes back to court in October; it is still possible that when it does the council may get a permanent injunction requiring the Bell Hotel to be kept as a hotel and not an asylum centre. It also remains open to local authorities to take other planning enforcement action against asylum hotels elsewhere, despite the process being fairly slow. These developments need to be watched. But whatever happens, the damage done to the reputation of the Labour Party as a result of the Epping affair is likely to be with it for a very long time.
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