UK Borders Bill

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. Although his amendment would make deportation possible, it would be unlikely to happen in practice. Low though my opinion is of the Home Office, the Home Secretary is at least accountable in some way to public opinion. That is one of the reasons we have had a few Home Secretaries recently. The public have lost confidence in them. Ultimately, I would prefer to put my faith, little though it is, in the Home Office rather than in the judiciary, because the judiciary is completely unaccountable and, in far too many instances, passes sentences that defy rationality and common sense. I shall make my final point bluntly. There should be no country in the world considered so dangerous that we should not deport people to it if they are persistent criminals or have carried out serious crimes such as rape. I do not know what case the hon. Member for Walthamstow was talking about, but at least one rapist was imprisoned, and not deported on release, because Somalia was deemed to be too dangerous, and went on to commit another rape. I do not know the outcome, but I suspect that he still has not been deported. The Foreign Office was able to spend £10,000 on sending a private jet into Somalia, presumably containing security guards, to rescue people who had British passports and who had been fighting on one side or the other in the Somali civil war and were connected with al-Qaeda. We were able to get planes in to pick people up—although I suspect that they will not make a great contribution to this country—so we should be able to send planes to take back people who are detrimental to the safety of the public in this country, such as the rapist I mentioned. As anyone who has been to Africa or anywhere in the third world will know, a little bit of money goes a long way. If we wanted to deport someone to Somalia, we would not need to go to the expense of chartering private jets. We could simply take them to the Kenyan border and pay someone a few dollars to take them over in a minibus. It would be easy to deport people to Somalia. Put me into the Home Office and I will deport people who do not belong in this country left, right and centre. There is no single country to which we cannot physically deport people, and there is no country so dangerous that we should not deport people to it if they have committed the most serious offences.