You don't normally have to look far to find a European court willing to weaken British anti-terrorism legislation. The European Court of Human Rights has been doing a pretty handy job for a while now, and the European Court of Justice has today happily stepped in to perform a similar function.
It has ruled that family members of terrorist suspects should be allowed to claim full social security benefits, including disability, living allowance, income support, and child, housing and council tax. The British government had attempted to ensure that this was not the case, mindful of the fact that there was probably a pretty reasonable chance that the benefits claimed by, for example, the wife of a terrorist suspect may just have found their way to the terrorist suspect himself.
The European Court of Justice has overturned this, as they have decided that 'it is hard to imagine how those funds could be turned into means that could be used to support terrorist activities'. Perhaps they underestimate how much this government allows the unemployed to claim.
Many of those affected by this ruling will be the foreign national terror suspects that the government has been consistently thwarted in attempting to deport by various courts. We are used to being told that al-Qaeda ideologues and terrorist suspects cannot be removed from the UK if there is the chance they will be mistreated in their country of origin. Yet now we are being told that not only can we not deport them, the taxpayer must also ensure they remain living a life of relative financial comfort.
For years, we have been paying terrorist suspects to live in the UK. When this kind of decadence goes unaddressed, no-one can be surprised that public finances are in the state that they are.
