Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O’Flynn

Why is Labour sticking up for foreign criminals?

(Getty images)

That the left-wing Labour MP Clive Lewis should have organised a letter to Home Secretary Priti Patel opposing the deportation of Jamaican criminals hardly comes as a surprise. Being against the removal of foreign nationals, almost irrespective of what they have done to deserve it, is pretty standard fare for a member of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs – the leftist caucus associated with the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott. That Lewis’s letter was signed by around 60 Labour MPs – easily more than a third of Labour backbenchers and twice the total membership of the Campaign Group – was more surprising.

To see the names of mainstream Labour figures such as Tony Lloyd and Barry Sheerman listed as backers tells us that opinion on such matters in the party has shifted decisively since the Labour administration of Tony Blair brought in the UK Borders Act 2007, under the auspices of which the deportations were arranged.

More telling still was the fact that senior Labour figures once regarded as uber-Blairites decided to hop aboard this bandwagon for allowing a motley crew of foreign national killers, sex offenders, thugs and drug dealers to stay in Britain.

Liam Byrne, a minister in the administrations of Blair and Brown, wrote his own letter calling for Patel to ‘pause, reflect and reconsider the planned mass deportation of citizens to Jamaica’. His use of the word citizens here was curious indeed, for a central fact was that none of the putative deportees was a British citizen. Like Lewis, he cited the Windrush scandal as a reason for aborting the deportations.

More strikingly still, so did the current Labour frontbencher Lucy Powell during an appearance on Times Radio. Powell even described the deportation of migrants with criminal records as a ‘very grey area’, when in fact one would have thought it a crystal-clear principle for any government concerned with the well-being of its own citizens.

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