The lead judge in the Court of Appeal challenge that overturned a decision to shut down a migrant hotel faces allegations of bias over his ties to far-left organisations and leftist political causes, including the socialist Fabian Society.
On Friday, the Court of Appeal ruled in favour of the Home Office against the Epping Council in Essex to reverse a High Court injunction to shut down the Bell Hotel amid protests sparked after an illegal migrant from Ethiopia was accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in the town.
The Home Office sensationally argued that the concerns of residents over their safety were not “equal” to the government’s ability to fulfil its obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to house alleged asylum seekers. Representing the Home Office, Edward Brown KC claimed that there is a “national interest in ensuring vulnerable individuals, namely asylum seekers, are accommodated”.
Ruling in favour of the government, Lord Justice Bean said that local concerns of safety are “clearly outweighed… by the undesirability of incentivising protests, by the desirability in the interests of justice of preserving the status quo for the relatively brief period leading up to the forthcoming trial and by the range of public interest factors which we have discussed in our judgement.”
The decision was a major victory for the left-wing government as it seeks to continue to house over 30,000 supposed asylum seekers — many of whom entered the country illegally over the English Channel — in hundreds of hotels across the country. It also represents a significant blow to the numerous other local councils planning legal action to shut down migrant hotels in their communities.
However, leading barrister Steven Barrett has filed a formal complaint to the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office, arguing that Lord Justice Bean “should not have heard the Bell Hotel appeal” given his apparent conflicts of interest with pro-mass migration groups, according to The Telegraph.
Barrett pointed to Lord Justice Bean being a founding member of the Matrix Chambers, a London-based law firm, which the barrister claimed is “firmly associated with advocacy in favour of allowing migrants to stay.”
Among other prominent lawyers involved in Matrix Chambers, he noted, is Cherie Blair KC, the wife of former Labour Party Prime Minister Tony Blair, who instituted many of the so-called human rights reforms which have been used to prevent successive governments from removing migrants from Britain.
“Lord Justice Bean erred, in failing to properly consider, or if not fail to consider, fail to properly apply, the test of ‘apparent bias’,” Barrett said.
The barrister also highlighted Lord Justice Bean’s 28 years of membership in the Labour Party and his status as a former chairman of the socialist Fabian Society, which he said “advocates in favour of migrants”.
Indeed, in a collection of essays published by the socialist think tank in 2019, now Foreign Secretary David Lammy — then a Labour MP — called for “an amnesty for undocumented migrants, an end to the indefinite detention of asylum seekers and the guarantee of the right to appeal immigration decisions from within the UK” to bring about a “more
just immigration system that works not just for migrants but for society as a whole.”
The Fabian Society, founded in 1884, became a major political force in Britain under the government of Tony Blair, having boasted of sending over 200 MPs — including Blair cabinet members — to the House of Commons following his 1997 landslide victory.
Named after the Roman general Quintus Fabius, renowned for his strategy of delaying attacks on Hannibal to chip away and weaken the Carthaginians gradually, the Fabian Society has also adopted a gradualist, long march through the institutions approach for instituting a leftist agenda in Britain. Although it was since abandoned, the original coat of arms for the group was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
