Whose rights?
IS housing migrants who have illegally forced their way into Britain more important than the concerns of local people worried about their arrival?
Yesterday the Home Office was in court arguing that the human rights of asylum seekers trumped those of Epping Council and, by extension, the residents they are elected to serve.
It was desperate stuff from a department which has failed for years to grip this crisis.
Government lawyers fighting the temporary closure of The Bell Hotel claimed that arrests of asylum seekers did not justify shutting it down.
Protests by local people in Epping were, they said, driven by “animosity towards asylum seekers”.
Once again the Home Office has branded anyone concerned about large groups of unknown young men placed in their neighbourhoods as racist.
Whatever the outcome over Epping, the Government needs to decide whose side it is on.
Do voters really want their taxes spent on paying personal trainers and hairdressers to mollycoddle asylum seekers, as The Sun reveals today? It’s unlikely.
Backing those who come here illegally at the expense of those already living and working here will end very badly for Labour.
Hit back at Vlad
TYRANT Putin’s outrageous attack on the British Council offices in Kyiv – and the deaths of yet more innocent Ukrainians in one of the biggest air strikes of the war – shows he remains in no mood for peace.
Since his talks with Donald Trump in Alaska, the lethal bombardments have continued.
Putin is still refusing to meet Zelensky or seriously negotiate a deal.
His meetings with China’s President Xi and North Korea despot Kim Jong- un also send a blatant message that he remains intent on building a power axis bent on destabilising the West.
A show of strength from Trump – hitting Russia with crippling financial sanctions – cannot come soon enough.
Costly errors
LABOUR surely never meant to take power only to make poor people poorer.
Yet that is what has happened as inflation and tax rises have taken a huge chunk out of lower income families while better-off households pay less.
The Government has failed to understand that taxing businesses leads to added costs for consumers.
Yet it is planning on making the same mistake by slapping private landlords with a National Insurance rise.
All that will do is immediately drive up rents, making it even more unaffordable for the lower paid.
Has the Treasury learned nothing?