The Sheer Bad Craziness of UK Immigration Law

 Here’s a little experiment that you can run in your own free time with a willing research subject. Take a fairly mild-mannered, middle-class, reasonable adult-in-the-room voter. Then give him five judgments to read from the Upper Tribunal’s Immigration and Asylum Chamber, taken at random. And then watch your Centrist Dad transform into Attila the Hun.

I have written about what goes on in the Immigration and Asylum Chamber before from jurisprudential and political theological perspectives. In this piece, I will focus on another aspect of the phenomenon, which is the role played by purported ‘expertise’ in borking and gumming up the system and otherwise debasing legal process. As a window onto this issue, I will be using the recent case of Secretary of State for the Home Department v CC UI-2024-005955 (2025), in which a decision of the First-Tier Tribunal to prevent deportation of a foreign sex offender and drug dealer was successfully appealed on the grounds that – to put it technically – it was not only completely hare-brained but actively mendacious....<<<Read More>>>...