The Times (1 May 2008, page 66) Law Report states that the House of Lords determined that "Government guidance to National Health Service employers which had the effect of preventing overseas trainee doctors from being offered postgraduate training places in NHS hospitals was unlawful."
If the UK is a liberal democracy, as is frequently claimed, how can parliamentary decisions be unlawful? Judges are supposed to apply the law, not interpret it and certainly not make it.
In the news item on this subject on page 15 The Times' Health Editor writes:
"By 'dashing the legitimate expectations' of doctors who had been encouraged to come to Britain, the law lords said, Ms Hewitt had acted unfairly."
The case was brought by the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin. The crux of the matter is that the trainee doctors want to take up permanent residence here.
People who apply for visas are aware of the constraints. So they are not treated unfairly.
The article conjectures that as a result of the decision some 700 to 1,000 British-trained doctors will "be unable to get a training post in 2009, 2010 and beyond."
It is they who are being treated unfairly, and it is doubly unfair that they have no recourse to the law.
This bias has close parallels with my (unfairly failed) attempts to use the law to prevent foreign men from being allowed to live and work in the UK through marriage.
Other people were able to use the law in this regard and they successfully thwarted the Conservative Government's election policy in 1979 - but no Englishman (Scotsman, etc.) could avail himself of the law.
Patricia Hewitt was in the forefront when, as General Secretary of the National Council of Civil Liberties (now renamed Liberty) she campaigned against this concession - which it is - that allows foreign men to occupy the UK in this way.
It is no wonder lawyers justify safeguarding their power. Immigration controversies provide them with an endless gravy train and other peoples with a road to these sorely self-afflicted islands.
