Gerald Warner: Abu Qatada carry-on shows Britain’s finished as a sovereign nation

COALITION is doing frightfully well, don’t you think? Building on the sure foundation of George’s Budget with its long overdue penalising of grannies, Cornish pasty-guzzlers, child benefit drones, Christian bigots trying to keep roofs on their churches and other anti-social elements, the Government has now been further strengthened by the news that Francis Maude’s timely warning to hoard petrol may have kept us out of recession. Who said the Tories had lost credibility as managers of the economy?

COALITION is doing frightfully well, don’t you think? Building on the sure foundation of George’s Budget with its long overdue penalising of grannies, Cornish pasty-guzzlers, child benefit drones, Christian bigots trying to keep roofs on their churches and other anti-social elements, the Government has now been further strengthened by the news that Francis Maude’s timely warning to hoard petrol may have kept us out of recession. Who said the Tories had lost credibility as managers of the economy?

It now remains to move forward resolutely with the measures most urgently needed to restore economic growth: same-sex marriage and abolition of the House of Lords, to be replaced with… er… something else. Meanwhile Dave, whose inspirational Easter utterances affirmed his commitment to resist oppressive measures against Christians, is fighting a case in the European Court to confirm his Government’s right to ban the cross in public places. Downing Street watchers have also detected a straw in the wind that suggests Dave and his colleagues may be preparing a more detailed and ambitious government programme: the proposal to legislate for blank cigarette packets. Since these are the media on which this government’s plans are devised, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that ministers are clearing the decks for some major initiatives.

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Yet a government is judged, above all, by its administration of justice and national security. In that context, one need utter just two words: Abu Qatada. Anyone who claims he could have made up this bizarre shambles is being economical with the actualité. The combined imaginations of Baron Münchhausen and the Brothers Grimm could never have concocted this Arabian Nights fantasy. It is now a decade since Abu Qatada was first arrested in Britain, but he has never been prosecuted here for any criminal offence. He first entered the United Kingdom on a forged passport, requested asylum and it was granted in 1994. His asylum request was based on fear of religious persecution. Religious intolerance is a terrible thing, as he presumably told immigration officials fervently.

He was subsequently accused of masterminding a terrorist cell in Germany; by the Home Office of being the spiritual guru of the chief of the 9/11 attackers; by the United Nations of al-Qaeda affiliations; by Spanish prosecutors of being the religious leader of four jihadist groups, including al-Qaeda; and by the Jordanian government of involvement in a plot to bomb tourists. Give a dog a bad name… Abu Qatada has twice been arrested and released since 2002. That heroic body the European Court of Human Rights entered the fray and helpfully ruled against his deportation to Jordan. So far, this farce has cost British taxpayers £1.4 million in custody and legal costs and more than £500,000 in benefits to his family. One would have thought that if there was one task to which Home Secretary Theresa May would have devoted meticulous care it was getting this unwelcome guest off British soil.

Instead, in a farcical fiasco worthy of a Yes, Minister script, she miscalculated the date at which Abu Qatada’s right of appeal to Europe would expire and had him arrested 24 hours prematurely, allowing his lawyers to lodge an appeal that could see him released again. May is not fit for purpose. If she was misled by her officials she is still inadequate to hold her portfolio. She blamed Brodie Clark and UK Border Agency officials when she left Britain’s borders open to all-comers in the summer of 2011; that excuse will not fly again.

May should be sacked. Yet there is a discernible pattern here. May is the strutting, kitten-heeled harridan who notoriously told real Conservatives there was no room for them “in our party”. Francis Maude, the Genie of the Jerry-can, is her modernising guru. George Osborne, the Chancellor who has finally lost this government of bungling amateurs all vestigial credibility, is in charge of the modernising project. The same arrogant but naïve illusions that committed this gang of incompetents to the fatuous “modernisation” of the Conservative Party renders them unfit for government. They are the destroyers of their own party and UKIP’s most effective recruiting sergeants.

Beyond their buffoonery, mirrored in the other main political parties, is the elephant in the room: Britain’s loss of sovereignty which prevents it, over a 10-year period, deporting an undesirable such as Abu Qatada. The reality is that this country is no longer sovereign; European bureaucrats and judges have usurped our Parliament and courts, with the complicity of our traitorous political class. Scottish Nationalists prate of taking back sovereignty for Scotland; it does not even reside with the United Kingdom Government – only their paranoid delusions could inflate the impotent charlatans at Westminster into a simulacrum of the government of a sovereign nation state.