The rights involved with the national government housing asylum seekers trumps the rights of local residents represented by their district council, government lawyers told a court on Thursday as they sought to have an injunction against a migrant hotel overturned.
The British government is fighting a rearguard action against a court ruling which, it argues, could collapse the national asylum system by arguing its rights to act trumps local rights, that concerns over migrant crime are not “rational”, and that in any case the asylum system is in the national interest.
The appeal concerns the controversy surrounding the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, which was converted in to what is called a migrant hotel — a government funded accommodation for boat migrants who flout legal routes into the UK to claim asylum — which was subject to an injunction earlier this month. The hotel had been ordered to close to migrants because the local council has successfully argued in a lower court that the hotel was ignoring planning (zoning) laws by acting not as a hotel but as a permanent residence for 138 men without change of use permission.
Submissions from government lawyers, and lawyers speaking on behalf of the Bell Hotel challenging that ruling were heard before a panel of judges at the Court of Appeal in London today for a ruling expected tomorrow.
In court, lawyers acting for the local council accused the government of having built their argument on “generalised assertions” rather than hard facts, and pointed out that there is nothing in law that says the government trying to house asylum seekers and illegal migrants is so important that it overrules all other UK law.
Extraordinarily, the government’s lawyers argued that while the rights of local people as represented by their District council were important, they were not “equal” to the rights of the government to house migrants, reports The Daily Telegraph. These competing rights are “fundamentally different in nature” and the “relevant public interests in play are not equal”, they said.
Much of the government’s arguments fell back on the notion that it has to house boat migrants, and therefore shouldn’t be impeded in doing that, and that the arguments being held against it aren’t genuine legal concerns but rather thinly disguised “animosity towards asylum seekers”.
It is in the “national interest” that asylum seekers are accommodated, they said, and argued that the government has “a fundamental statutory duty” to house “very large numbers of (potentially) destitute asylum seekers”. These legal duties, of course, exist only because the government wants them to: with a commanding majority in Parliament, the left-wing Labour government can pass any law it wishes, including ones that could relieve it of the statutory duties it claims to be bound by, or the influence of foreign courts.
The government also claimed migrant hotels need special protection from local council powers because they are “Critical National Infrastructure”. In doing so their lawyers may have given appearance of creating a new definition of that well-established term on the fly.
Indeed, the government’s own documentation explains what constitutes Critical National Infrastructure quite clearly, being infrastructure that if damaged, destroyed, or lost “could result in significant loss of life or casualties… Significant impact on national security, national defence, or the functioning of the state”. Examples of such infrastructure include nuclear power stations, the police force, or the food system.
The government also argued that the council’s use of planning (zoning) to force the closure of the hotel was dishonest, because actually their motivation had been dealing with the now long-running anti-migrant-hotel protests in Epping that began after a resident was accused of sexually assaulting a local girl.
Concern about migrants in hotels are “fuelled by dis-information on social media”, the government’s lawyers said, while arguing that claims about migrant crime are actually not “rational” or proven at all. The lawyer said: “that fear arises from a very small number of incidents, which are acknowledged to be serious, as opposed to any rational view that the individuals accommodated in general terms have a greater propensity to criminal activity… That was not a conclusion that can or should have been reached at all and we say was not one Epping that was in a position to advance.”
Epping Council’s lawyers, for their part, pushed back on the claims of the government that it has special rights because of the perceived urgency of housing migrants. They asserted that housing asylum seekers is not, in fact, “more important” than local concerns and pointed out that migrant hotels do not have “special dispensation” to flaunt planning law.
They said in a submission lodged with the court: “The planning regime enacted by Parliament does not give… special dispensation merely because they are accommodating asylum seekers. Nor has Parliament decreed that the public interest in accommodating asylum seekers trumps the public interest in maintaining planning control.”
In all, they said: “The task of supporting asylum seekers is not inherently more important than addressing local concerns… particularly where there is public disorder, although that appears to be the [Home Secretary’s] assumption.”
The case is, as observed even by the political editor of The Times, the UK’s newspaper of record, “political poison” and “toxic” for the Labour government, given they fought and won a general election last year in part on a promise to close all migrant hotels. Now just 13 months later they are fighting an increasingly bitter legal battle to keep them open, against their manifesto promises.
It does so knowing its actions are wildly out of kilter with the public mood, with repeated opinion polls finding voters deeply disapproving of the government’s handling of the asylum crisis, and much more besides. As reported earlier this week, a YouGov poll found 71 per cent of Britons said the government is doing a bad job on borders and asylum.
Worse still for Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is that he can’t even take solace in knowing he’s at least pleasing his own voters, with a majority of Labour supporters at 56 per cent agree the government is failing. The Reform UK Party of Nigel Farage was reckoned by respondents to be most trusted with border control.
Other recent polls of Britons found a strong majority backing deploying the Royal Navy to turn back migrant boats, and a plurality backing even positions as staunch as zero migration and large-scale deportations.
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