Andrew Tettenborn

When a maniac ran amok on a train near Huntingdon on Saturday, train steward Samir Zitouni put his life on the line. Zitouni bravely blocked the attacker from stabbing a girl, leaving him with a gash on his head and neck. The railway worker remains critically unwell in hospital. His family say they are ‘immensely

Seventy-five years ago today the European Convention on Human Rights was signed in Rome by the 12 states, including Britain, that then formed the Council of Europe. There will be official celebrations: in Strasbourg tonight, a solemn ceremony of speeches and a gala classical concert at the Opéra national du Rhin, and in London next

When Nigel Farage introduced a bill in the House of Commons requiring the UK to leave the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights) this week, it was clear that something has changed in British politics. It wasn’t the absence of deluded heckling from Labour MPs or Lib Dem leader Ed Davey, both of which were

The Met has announced that it will stop investigating non-crime hate incidents, or NCHIs. The pressure on other forces to fall into line may well now be hard to resist (we will have to see). But don’t cheer too loudly yet. The devil is in the detail, and there may be less to rejoice over

The problems with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the bureaucracy behind it aren’t limited to the spanners they push into the wheels of immigration enforcement. They also now appear to be meddling over hard-won sex-based rights. A letter from the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner, Michael O’Flaherty, is likely to be

Kemi Badenoch’s announcement that the Conservatives are now irrevocably committed to pulling out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) surprised no-one. It was nevertheless nicely done, and showed that here at least the Tory leader is playing a bad hand rather well. The Tories have now stolen a march on Nigel Farage For

Labour is again running scared on migration. At the party’s conference yesterday, Shabana Mahmood made a clear pitch to middle Britain on the subject. ‘You may not always like what I do,’ she said, addressing Labour’s left, but as regards migration we had to ‘question some of the assumptions and legal constraints that have lasted for a generation and more’. She would, she added, be tightening the rules on indefinite

There was a grain or two of truth in what Donald Trump said last week about migration. A polity is indeed vulnerable to being eaten from the inside by the entry of large numbers of people from very different backgrounds who are not inclined to embrace its culture in preference to their own. But the

The failure to deport any illegal migrants at all on the first designated flight to France yesterday under the agreement the government struck with France in August may be due to bad luck rather than bad management. This is still bad news for the nation; the smuggling gangs, far from being smashed by a complacent

How things change. Five years ago few electors cared about the UK’s membership of the ECHR. Today that same convention, with its baneful effect on our ability to police our borders and keep out undesirables, is fast taking centre stage and becoming Concern Number One with burgeoning numbers of voters: voters who, as the government

Three researchers from Leicester University’s Centre for Hate Studies produced a curious report on Monday about the English countryside. Their theme is that much of rural England is a white racist redoubt, where anyone from an ethnic minority is made to feel unwelcome and psychologically, if not physically, excluded. People of colour, it is said,

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

If Nigel Farage wanted headline treatment for his immigration speech at Oxford Airport this morning, he certainly got it. So far the reaction has been fairly predictable. But politically, there is a good deal more to this affair than meets the eye. The difficulty faced by Farage’s opponents is that, whatever the details, the man’s

The government is badly rattled on immigration. It knows that its perceived inability either to curb rampant asylum abuses or smartly deport those who ought not to be here amounts to an electoral threat. Over this Bank Holiday weekend the Home Office announced yet another scheme to deal with the matter. Currently anyone refused asylum

Yesterday’s injunction granted to Epping Forest council giving the government three weeks to stop using the Bell Hotel for asylum seekers on planning grounds is not quite the slam-dunk that it looks. It is theoretically open to appeal: furthermore, it is only an interim measure pending a full trial later this year. But the affair

The Home Secretary’s extension of the list of countries covered by the ‘deport now, appeal later’ scheme for foreign criminals, announced this morning, doesn’t actually add to the number of undesirables that we can deport. But it could lubricate the process of getting rid of them. Barring a Damascene conversion of the Strasbourg court, something

Last week, 15 judges from the International Court of Justice at the Vredespaleis in the Hague, at the request of the UN General Assembly, pronounced solemnly on climate change. Every state, they said, owed duties in international law to take all reasonable measures to suppress climate change; duties, they added, which included exercising control over