Jacqui Smith and the rolling heads

Stones cast at the Home Secretary over the years have finally served their purpose. Jacqui Smith is going to step down in the next cabinet reshuffle, which looks like next week. European election results will show how well Labour fares and from this Gordon Brown will make some decisions. Cabinet reshuffles have been very common in the Blair/Brown years, and we are set for one in the days to come. The Home Office has had Blunkett, Reid, Clarke, and who else? I cannot remember. Not that it makes a difference. It is all a shambles. Under Smith, illegal aliens were hired to work in security firms, and a number managed to get their hands on Blair's car as they were hired to work in a garage. Smith simply tried to keep mum about it. So heads will roll very soon. And more heads will be exalted to office. It's called musical chairs. And then we have an election. And who knows. But of all this change, do we really expect any change? I would not hold my breath. Rather, I will be using mine to advocate change; but change is a very bad word. For, in fact, we did get change. Remember when British citizens, if they did not break the law, were not subject to arrest, as they had not broken the law? Thus, if not subject to arrest, they could not be extradited to a foreign country, as, quite simply, they had not broken the law? And, bear with me yet a bit more here, there had to be prima facie evidence presented if and when a foreign power did ask for the extradition of a UK citizen? Well, guess what, we have change. Blunkett signed into law some newfangled extradition treaty with the US a few years back, his many successors have seen fit to uphold these treaties - the drafts of which were written in American English and handed to MPs as if they were the ten commandments - and now totally innocent Britons have been facing a legal nightmare. Or illegal nightmare. Take the case of Ian Norris for instance. He was the CEO of Morgan Crucible, a job he got after 30 years of service to that firm. He followed the letter of the law in regards pricing policies, but disagreed with price fixing agreements, so he went to the powers that be to have them outlawed. He then retired. Off he was to play golf in his Thames Valley Country Club when the long arm of the law in the US decided he would spend his retirement in a US prison. Quite simple it would have been to tell this lot that he had not broken the law, and whatever they thought of any previous practices, they were not only legal at the time, but, he had not committed them on US soil. One might think that, but John Reid and his junior minister Joan Ryan did not. I still recall sitting in the gallery in Parliament one Wednesday when Ryan tried to argue that these were very good laws indeed. I watched closely her facial expressions and wondered. Was she on drugs? Who paid her to say such idiotic rubbish? The Times the next day reported she was 'digging herself in'. And deeply she dug, but it was not just herself that had fallen in. She was opening the door to a foreign power to extradite British citizens even when no crime had been committed. 'Robust', she called the measures. Ecstasy? Crack? Prozac? LSD? To this day I have no idea which drug she may have been taking. Can she have really been that stupid? We may never know. But there is a fear that this woman can actually be the next Home Secretary. Stranger things have happened. But whoever replaces the hapless Smith, that person will be lobbied to release asylum seekers without delay. We simply cannot have blood on our hands and keep thousands of people in enforced idleness at a great cost to the taxpayer. There have been sensible proposals on the table and now is the time to act on them. So, Dear Mr/Mrs/Miss or Ms next Home Secretary, please make this a priority, and then get rid of these treasonous extradition laws that have been used to undermine British justice. Or your head, too, will be the next to roll.