If you’re shocked by this, you haven’t been paying attention:
Good luck to Trenton Oldfield, his wife Deepa Naik and their newborn baby today: it’s Oldfield’s day of judgement. He will find out if he is to be kicked out of the country, as the Home Office wants because, in its view, his presence in Britain is ‘not conducive to the public good’. The tribunal hearing is at 1400.
Oldfield, if you remember, disrupted the Oxford-Cambridge boat race a couple of years back and served a bizarrely lengthy prison sentence as a consequence. I did not – and still don’t – agree with his protest. But it hurt nobody, endangered nobody apart from himself and the boat race was concluded. It seems to me to have been a rather grandly eccentric protest in a great British tradition.
What is not part of the Great British tradition is the spite and vindictiveness on the part of our state which followed. I assume the state is taking its wrath out on Trenton – who, incidentally, works for a living, has not claimed a penny in benefits and provides work for other people – because it is unable to kick out the real nutters, the Islamists who wish to blow us all up, or Somalian rapists who can’t be deported in case they find Somalia an inclement place to be. Oldfield is an Aussie, and we can treat them just how we like.
