| Then again, they may not. |
Speaking to the House of Commons, both Prime Minister Tony Blair and his embattled home secretary Charles Clarke insisted that the scandal over foreign prisoners had dated back to previous governments. “This system has not worked properly for decades. It is actually working now,” Blair told a jeering opposition as he defended Clarke from fresh calls to resign over the release of 1,023 foreign prisoners. “We have to work through the backlog of cases which we will do but it is completely wrong to say that this problem was created or begun by this home secretary,” Blair said during the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions.
Conservative opposition leader David Cameron dismissed Blair’s response. “People listening to that answer will, frankly, think it pathetic,” he said. “This scandal has happened on his watch and he cannot run away from responsibility for it.”
Clarke unleashed a furor last week when he acknowledged that 1,023 foreign convicts who should have been considered for deportation after serving their sentences were instead released back into the community.
In announcing what Blair called a “radical overhaul”, Clarke said he would publish a consultation paper by the end of May to set up a new system where foreign criminals “should expect to be deported”. Clarke added that of the 1,023 prisoners who were released by mistake, 574 cases were being considered for deportation, of which 554 have been completed. In all 446 are to be deported, he said.
| Once they exhaust all their appeals to the British courts, then the House of Lords, then the EU Court of Appeals, and doubtless other Euro courts I've never heard of before. |
| All of whom were named Jacques, Gerhardt and Emilio, right? |
Saying the government had failed its primary mission to protect the public, the Conservative’s specialist on home affairs, David Davis, said Clarke’s proposals amounted to “bolting the prison door after the prisoners have fled”.