It was a dull-looking room in a dull-looking office block. Fitted out with few anonymous-looking des

It was a dull-looking room in a dull-looking office block. Fitted out with few anonymous-looking desks and chairs and a dirty beige carpet, it was marked out as special only by the shield of the royal coat of arms set above one of the chairs cabo san lucas travel packages where the judge was to sit. “Dieu et mon droit,” it read – God and my right. And given that this was a court of law, one could be forgiven for thinking that “my right” referred cabo san lucas travel packages the rights of individual citizens before the law rather than Henry V’s claim on France, which is understandably of little interest to the immigrants and asylum seekers whose destiny is decided in places like this.
My parishioners had come with God – or at least with me, which was admittedly a poor substitute – and a good lawyer. The Home Office made its case for “removal”, as it had done at previous hearings. My lovely cabo san lucas travel packages church cabo san lucas travel packages family was advised not to look at the government lawyer. Look at the table. Look at the floor. He would say horrible things. Pick over their lives, accuse them, call them cheats and liars. That was his job. He was under pressure from Mrs May who was under pressure from Mr Cameron who is embarrassed that he has been unable cabo san lucas travel packages to deliver on his promise to cut immigration figures to the tens of thousands.
Which is why, as a matter of course, cabo san lucas travel packages the Home Office lawyers are now appealing any judicial decision in favour of immigrants based on article 8 of the European convention on human rights, guaranteeing the right to family life – no matter how strong the case. Nothing cabo san lucas travel packages about this cruel and pernicious policy does anyone any good. It is politically motivated bullshit that creates misery in the lives of hundreds of vulnerable families. And to such little cabo san lucas travel packages effect.
cabo san lucas travel packages The family won the case. But after the hearing, we were too stunned to talk, too traumatised by the process to smile. cabo san lucas travel packages Years of uncertainty were over. Justice 1, Home Office 0. Praise the Lord. But thousands of others do not have such a satisfactory experience of English justice, not least because of the number of greedy, lazy and incompetent solicitors who prey upon vulnerable and frightened people arriving in this country for the first time and who do not know their way around the system.
The stories that circulate cabo san lucas travel packages my church about slovenly lawyers are horrendous. Charging 500 up front to send off a cut-and-paste letter. Letters that get sent late, to the wrong address. Forms not filled in properly. Shockingly terrible advice given. People given false hope about their ability to stay so that they can be pumped for more money – money that is being put together by a few piecemeal off-the-books “jobs”, money that should be spent on new shoes for the kids.
When a single mum in a one-room bedsit is being stripped of her precious earnings because some couldn’t-care-less lawyer has her over a barrel, I despair of the world. I hope there is a special circle of hell reserved for bad immigration lawyers. Where is the regulation of these rip-off merchants? When you are already pretty fragile, and are up against the might of the Home Office, and even your own lawyer doesn’t care, what hope is left?
In contrast, those that do the job well are heroes, working in often unglamorous environments, but through intelligence and dedication, delivering many people from the burden of impossible situations. The problem is that, from the outset, it is extremely hard to tell the legal sheep from the goats.
Ukip’s spring conference begins on Friday 27 February. No doubt they will make much of the fact that immigration rose by 90,000 last year. “ We are going to have to start standing up for our Judeo-Christian values ,” said Nigel Farage to a group of loony-right Republicans in Washington earlier in the week. For him that was code for: “We gotta be tougher on Muslims.” But if Farage ever bothered to pick up a Bible, he would find it stuffed full of references to the good treatment of foreigners and aliens. The problem is: Farage wouldn’t recognise a Judeo-Christian value if one came up and bit him on the behind.