Regardless of your individual stance on immigration, there is no avoiding the fact of public demand for lower numbers and stricter border control. The key is finding ways to do this sensibly, with as few downsides as possible for our economy, society, or the migrants themselves.

Cracking down on overseas students is not such a way. It must be one of the single most counterproductive immigration policies currently under discussion in Britain today. The Government feels compelled to try it because it has repeatedly promised the electorate lower overall ‘net migration’ numbers.

This is an unwise measure for two reasons. First makes the total subject to emigration levels – Brits going abroad – which the Government has, quite rightly, neither the intention nor desire to restrict.

Second, it takes no account of the differences between different sort of migrant. Rather than zeroing in on those that drive public concern, such as the low-skilled and those who don’t integrate, it encourages the Government to find reductions wherever it can. And skilled, law-abiding, well-documented forms of migration are easiest to target.

In fairness to Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, her policy is not as bad as a blanket crackdown – according to the Guardian she intends to introduce a tiered system that would penalise low-quality courses and institutions. Given that the UK doesn’t yet have a Which?-style consumer guide to university courses even for domestic students, there may be a consumer-protection case to be made for preventing poor courses from propping themselves up with overseas students who may not know quite what they’re buying.

However, against this mitigating nuance we must count the fact that the Home Office is also considering a crackdown of work visas. Nick Timothy, one of the Prime Ministers key lieutenants, has apparently proposed “restricting the right to work in Britain after graduation to those who attend Oxbridge and the Russell Group of universities.

But we must make sure that any policy continues to recognise overseas students as a national asset. They provide both a key financial foundation for our blossoming university system, a ready supply of talented professionals to keep our businesses competitive, and boost British soft power.

Even with tuition fees, Britain is a long way from having a true market in higher education. Fees remain capped below the cost of delivering a degree (and with most institutions charging maximum fees they don’t provide good price signals for degree quality, either). But no such caps exist for overseas students, who pay high commercial rates for their education. That helps to plug the gaps in university finances the taxpayer would otherwise have to fill.

Britain’s top universities are world-class institutions, and draw some of the brightest, most talented, and most ambitious students from across the world. A lot of these seek work in Britain after graduation – and with the UK trying to gear up to global competitiveness to meet the challenges posed by Brexit, we should be snapping them up. The basic effects of protectionism – favouring select producers, in this case domestic graduates, at the expense of the economy and thus everybody else – will otherwise kick in.

There are grounds for sensible compromise, particularly in light of the glut in graduates and the fact that many jobs now use degrees as applicant filters without actually needing them. But surely restrictions should be based as much as possible on the needs of business, rather than so brutally simple a producer-end filter as “Oxbridge and the Russell Group of universities”.

And those who do choose to return to their own countries after graduation, or seek opportunities elsewhere. They form, via university alumni networks, a new and powerful source of British soft power.

The more of a country’s political and business leaders were educated in Britain – especially if they aren’t essentially driven out afterwards, the more likely British diplomats and exporters are to find a friendly reception and useful contacts. Every one of those people forced to study elsewhere because Britain chose to keep them out is a potential national asset lost to a competitor.

I don’t believe that, in light of democratic concerns and welfare provision, a degree of scepticism about open borders conflicts with a liberal outlook. But such policies need to be properly targeted, otherwise we risk the worst of both worlds: damaging our economy on the one hand, whilst failing to assuage public concern on the other by not tackling the aspects immigration actually driving it.

Henry is the Assistant Editor at Conservative Home. Follow him on Twitter: @HCH_Hill

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As the result of the US election continues to sink in, one of the least surprising developments is a renewed round of demands for the abolition of the Electoral College system and its replacement with true one-person, one-vote democracy for presidential elections. Our Events Coordinator, Maria Murphy, makes the case at length here.

But I’ve had a couple of days since the result to think about it and whilst I’m not convinced of the merits of the current system, I do think that a defence of it can and should be made before people make up their minds.

I am instinctively against systems which what could be called create privileged categories of voters. For example I’m opposed to suggestions that there should have been a higher threshold in the Brexit referendum than 50 per cent, because that privileged the views of defenders of the status quo over those demanding change. Likewise I don’t think that Scotland or Northern Ireland should have had a veto over the outcome.

But it is foolishly doctrinaire to refuse ever to adapt one’s views to changing circumstances, and it’s not hard to see why the case of the United States might be different. Here are a few of the reasons that the popular vote – “full democratic practice”, in Maria’s words – may be a bad idea.

A very important factor in how US elections work, and how they should work, is that the United States is a nation on a continental scale. This has a number of effects which make the prospect of unchecked majoritarianism both philosophically problematic and practically difficult.

For starters, what voting system would be used? The assumption that a popular vote model would have delivered this race to Hillary Clinton only holds if you believe not only that people would have voted the same way under a different system, but that the different system would have been first-past-the-post.

As of the time of writing Clinton’s popular-vote lead over Donald Trump is, according to this site, just over 260,000 votes. Libertarian Gary Johnson got more than four million and Jill Stein of the Greens more than 1.2 million. Even right-wing independent Evan McMullin’s 450,000 votes are getting close to twice Clinton’s lead.

Of course I’m no opponent of first-past-the-post, but without a proportional element a majority-vote system would actually reduce the power of minor parties by robbing them of the chance to concentrate their votes and pick up a state or two, undermining another candidate and potentially holding the balance of power.

But the more serious objection is that a push for a majoritarian voting system is completely at odds with the recognised fact, repeated so often that it’s becoming cliché, that “America has never been more divided”.

If I had to make a single, over-arching defence of the current US electoral system, it’s that it has ensured that each side gets to be in power on a fairly regular basis.

Tellingly the two instances in the last five elections where the College has ‘thwarted’ the popular vote (albeit not a huge popular vote margin) it has been to the detriment of the same side: the Democrats. This explains both why Republicans tend to favour the College and why Democrat supporters, such as Vox, oppose it. That article also highlights that any move to a popular vote model would – assuming no change in voting patterns – favour the cities and coasts over rural and inland America.

The fact that one party would have won four of the past five Presidential elections – probably all five, given that the Republicans wouldn’t have had incumbency in 2004 – is a big potential problem with moving to a popular vote system. It might not be in a country with a relatively strong political consensus, unified culture, and narrow Overton Window, but the United States is definitely not that country.

Vox argues that rural and, let’s be honest, Republican America has things like the Senate to represent their interests. But it’s difficult to believe that progressive advocates of reform are advancing that argument in good faith. What they’re holding out is the prospect of half the country fighting a doomed rear-guard action against an office consistently held by a faction they neither trust nor respect.

I think there’s more than one answer to the question of what the central purpose of democracy is. Making sure the person with the most votes always wins is a good one, and the one to which I subscribe by default. But what if that clashes, not just in a one-off vote like a referendum but consistently, with the principle of government by consent?

This year Clinton’s margin over Trump is, again according to the site I linked above, 264,939 votes out of 126,305,866 cast: that’s 0.2 per cent. In 2000 Al Gore beat George W Bush by the more substantial 547,398 in an election with about 20 million fewer ballots cast, but that’s still just 0.5 per cent. Obviously those numbers may change at the margins depending on what source you use, but it’s the scale that’s important.

Now 0.5 per cent, even 0.2 per cent, are not nothing. But nor do they strike me as so overwhelming as to make an “irrefutable” case for a system which would likely skew the White House heavily towards a group who are only a majority by such slender margins. Especially after an election where the key lesson we’re meant to be learning is that political elites haven’t been paying enough attention to the sort of people who just voted for Trump.

I’m instinctively unsympathetic to the Electoral College’s underlying assumption that votes should weigh differently, yet I think it may be necessary if America is to have a government its citizens consent to. I agree that a system which privileges elites is wrong, but I’m not convinced that the College does that – in fact by forcing urban politicians to stump in rural, non-coastal America it might just do the opposite.

Henry is the Assistant Editor at Conservative Home. Follow him on Twitter: @HCH_Hill

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Uber ruling: Drivers and consumers alike stand to lose out

That the courts have ruled that Uber must treat its drivers as employees is lamentable for all sorts of reasons, but there are far more losers than a narrow assessment of the case suggests.

If we give the courts the benefit of the doubt and assume they are simply revealing a contractual shortcoming, then with luck the company will simply be able to rework its contracts and continue as before.

If not, then a huge range of people stand to lose out. Passengers face higher fares and the effective loss of Uber’s service from their range of options whilst drivers lose the freedom of freelance work; which suits many, not least because they’re not on PAYE. Uber may lose profits and market share.

Nonetheless, in the media at least there is a whiff of ‘ought’ about this: the idea not that Uber drivers were employees but that, given their conditions of work, they ought to be employees. But if strict limits aren’t placed on the courts’ power to rewrite contracts; liberty takes a serious wound.

On the surface, the idea that courts can step in and retro-actively amend contracts they deem unjust has its appeal – and there is surely a place even in libertarian philosophy for judicial review of contracts in certain circumstances.

The proper realm for this is surely where deceit is involved, and one party is unaware of true nature or extent of their obligations.

In On Liberty, JS Mill uses the example of tackling a man about to cross an unstable bridge: the tackler is not infringing the liberty of the other because, in Mill’s view, the man’s intention was not to fall into the river. (Should the man choose to proceed once appraised of the risks, of course, that’s on him.)

This does not mean that the courts should not protect anybody from the unforeseen consequences of a contract whose terms were fully understood at the outset. It certainly shouldn’t give them scope to allow one party to go back and impose different terms that are more to their liking.

Nobody signs up as an Uber driver in the belief that they will be a PAYE employee with things like paid holiday entitlements. In the absence of this judgement amounts to the courts, either on their own bat or following a legislative imperative, deciding that Uber’s contracts aren’t nice and retroactively imposing one that pleased them better.

This produces the list of losers prescribed above. But the practice of re-writing contracts in the courts has a much longer list of victims: everybody. Because if we take Mill’s view that freedom is in large part the ability to make our own informed decisions, such judgements pull the rug from under our feet.

We are robbed of agency because we’re no longer able to make contracts with each other that both can depend upon. Instead we are always left to wonder whether or not we might find judges imposing obligations upon us that we did not undertake.

Not only might contracts and arrangements be altered after we have entered into them, but we might find ourselves retrospectively entered into agreements the courts feel we ought to have entered but which we would not have chosen to.

A good example of this is proposals that co-habiting couples should enjoy the same rights as married couples. It sounds nice, but consider that many people choose to cohabit and not marry precisely to avoid making such undertakings to each other.

Should the romance fade one party might emerge wishing they enjoyed the same protections and entitlements as a partner in a marriage, but that’s no reason whatsoever to grant them. After all, the other party might not even have given them the opportunity to amass such grievances had they known they were putting themselves on the hook in this way.

It can’t be said often enough that freedom must include the freedom to make mistakes. In this case, that means holding us accountable to the contracts we make – or our failure to make them.

Drivers who don’t like Uber’s contracts can seek employment elsewhere. Partners who want legal commitments can leave those who don’t offer them. Neither has the right to unilaterally impose favourable terms on their relationship with any person or organisation, or have judges do it for them.

Courts should confine themselves to the realms of ‘is’, and leave ‘ought’ to the politicians and philosophers. If they have been empowered or mandated by legislation to make such judgements, such laws should be changed.

The rule of judges is not the same as the rule of law. The arbitrary imposition of new terms on an private agreements is not only unjust to the party disfavoured in the judgement: it robs all of us of the clear, reliable rules we need to be free.

Henry is the Assistant Editor at Conservative Home. Follow him on Twitter: @HCH_Hill

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One of the challenges with being in a political party is that it will inevitably restrict your intellectual freedom of movement to some degree.

There’s nothing wrong with this: the trade-off between absolute individual autonomy and effective collective action is one we make all the time, and contrary to the caricature not something libertarians have a problem with – provided it’s voluntary, as party membership is.

But it’s nonetheless good to keep an eye on how it affects your thinking. For example, I’ve had it put to me that libertarian support for things like Margaret Thatcher defence of the Falklands, or continuing ‘British rule’ in Northern Ireland, are artefacts inherited from Tory thinking rather than being strong libertarian positions in their own right.

One doesn’t need to go far to find Ron Paul-style libertarians who venerate peace, for example, and Scotland actually has (or had) a pro-independence libertarian party.

But in fact, defence of both our Union and Overseas Territories – and outgrowths from them like the Commonwealth – is eminently possible on liberal, pro-human grounds. It is progressive opposition to either that is very often rooted in irrational, decidedly pre-modern ideas before being wrapped in fashionable language.

My case in point is this interview in the Belfast Telegraph by Anna Lo, a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly for the middle-of-every-road Alliance Party, in which she comes out in support of a ‘united Ireland’.

As she doesn’t hail from a traditional Irish nationalist background, I was curious to see what fresh arguments she might have found for such a position in the same week that one of Sinn Fein’s favourite economists conceded it would lead to “huge job cuts” in Ulster.

Alas, no. What I got instead was this: “Ireland is one island. I don’t think we should have a border to divide an island.” And it got worse:

“I would like to see Ireland united, and I think it is inevitable. I take a wider world view on the issue. I am against colonialism. I welcomed Hong Kong being returned to China in 1997. When both Germany and Vietnam were united, despite all the foreboding, the sky didn’t fall down.”

Those sentences, superficially at least, resemble an argument in the standard progressive mould. But when we actually stop to think about them we see that they much more closely resemble a sort of fashion statement.

Consider her international examples. I think the unification of Germany is a false analogue for Ireland, as East Germany did not represent the legitimate, divergent aspirations of even a chunk of its population. To my mind the relationship between Germany and German-yet-not Austria better mirrors that of Unionist and Nationalist Ireland – yet Anschluss is not a progressive cause.

Then we have Lo’s native Hong Kong, where long-standing liberal traditions – a legacy of its time as an autonomous part of the British Empire – are being undermined by Beijing. The city’s inhabitants regularly take to the streets to protest this, and the symbol of liberty they choose to march beneath is the British colonial flag.

As for the ‘unification’ of Vietnam, it was accompanied by the flight of almost 140,000 Vietnamese to the United States – you can bet there’d have been more if they could – and the addition of the ‘last chopper out of Saigon’ to the lexicon of human desperation.

Yet to Lo the handover of a liberal city to the world’s last great Communist empire, and the conquest of a country by its totalitarian neighbour, are things to celebrate.

Why? Because as with so much progressive thinking, ‘anti-colonialism’ seems very often to amount to an arbitrary, almost aesthetic sense of how things ought to be, irrespective of the human preferences involved.

So, you will often see geographical proximity cited as if it were a trump card: the Falklands are closer to Argentina; Gibraltar is closer to Spain; Northern Ireland borders the Republic; and so on. The wishes of those territories are treated as an irritant, an anomaly.

Or you might see references to the date (“…the modern world…”, “It’s 2016”, et al) advanced as if they were arguments. ‘Colonies’ don’t fit the progressive preconception for what the modern world ought to look like.

But step back and you realise that modern technology makes it more possible by the year for sympathetic territories to voluntarily associate, whether they be scattered across the world or, in the United Kingdom’s case, on two sides of a very small sea.

Indeed, what could be more modern than citizens of Hong Kong choosing for their inspiration London, so far in miles but so close in custom, rather than the geographically proximate but politically alien autocracy of Beijing?

The same holds true for the Commonwealth, or proposals for freedom of movement between the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Progressives oft deride this idea, but surely building such links between countries with centuries of common history than hugely disparate states which happen to neighbour each other, à la the EU?

By contrast it’s progressivism, so self-consciously ‘modern’, which provides a rhetorical shield to decidedly pre-modern ideas.

Hence Irish irredentism being graced with the label ‘united Ireland’, and not the ‘greater Ireland’ construction that Hungarian and Serbian revanchists have to endure, and its various claims upon Northern Ireland are often under-examined.

Why ‘ought’ Ireland to be unified? It being an island hasn’t been an imperative since the invention of boats – and most self-professed Irish nationalists don’t subscribe to this supposed imperative of coastlines anyway, if their support for Scottish independence is any indication.

Meanwhile the idea that some mystical ‘Irish nation’ has an absolute and unvarying ethno-cultural claim to a fixed allotment of territory is an old right-wing notion seldom professed by progressives – unless Lo has interesting views on the true and eternal borders of the German nation that she’s keeping quiet.

Modish progressives are led, by their opposition to the familiar, into bed with old and bad ideas indeed. It is so often the very British institutions they disdain – the Union, the Overseas Territories – which, despite their age, are the best vehicles for liberal modernity going, and that’s why we liberal Conservatives defend them.

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In a recent piece I wrote for Conservative Home about pensions, I made the following observation about the challenges involved in defusing the time bomb that projected entitlements for older citizens have set ticking under the public finances:

“This problem is very difficult to tackle because older people are not only much more likely to vote but feel fully entitled to what several generations of politicians have told them is their due. They have, after all, ‘paid in’.

“Of course they have no in fact done anything of the kind, for the most part: their tax contributions funded current expenditure, and were not squirrelled away to bankroll their retirements. In the private sector such pyramid arrangements are illegal.”

Following a Twitter furore over an unrelated piece which involved my “call to abolish pensions” being dragged in, one user aptly embodied the challenge in a single Tweet:

Setting aside the separate issue of the extent to which the Government is legally bound to promised entitlements – and our Tweeter pegs it at the level of a contractual obligation – it set me thinking about which side of this argument has best claim to the mantle of “fairness”.

What are those sides? One is certainly those silver citizens who either draw upon the entitlements under dispute or stand to do so.

At first glance the other is the Government. That is certainly the party charged with actually implementing changes to pensions, and the foe upon whom the advocates of the elderly will concentrate their fire.

But in my view the actual second party in this quarrel is the young, the future generations of taxpayers who will be expected to support an ever-broadening stratum of older dependents. It is their case which strikes me as the more compelling.

The line from the older generation is as straightforward as that set out in the gentleman’s tweet above: we were promised this, money was taken from us on the pretext of paying for it, so we are entitled to it.

But as I pointed out in the piece he is objecting to, in most cases they really haven’t “paid in” to anything. Every pound the state took from them in taxes it spent – indeed as our deficit attests, more than every pound.

It’s very easy to blame the politicians, and certainly generations of Britain’s political leaders must shoulder their share of it. But fundamentally, the reason we ended up with so many governments which spent more than they raised is because those are the programmes that won elections.

So today’s older voters have already spent decades voting to spend their children’s money. In this view it is almost impossible to see how they could be in credit with the state – yet that is precisely the logic of the “we’ve paid in” position.

No, what the “we’ve paid in” argument amounts to is the idea that the nominal collection of a portion of their money “for their pensions” entitles them to a further claim on the future earnings of tomorrow’s taxpayers – even though that initially-collected money has already been spent, on themselves.

The tragedy is that in the overwhelming majority of instances there is no mendacity at work here. The man I linked above is one of the few I’ve seen to baldly state that yes, governments do lie but a promise is a promise and he wants his cash.

For the most part, people do not follow policy closely or think about politics very much. They have simply been told by the people running the country that they have been making provision for their retirement and planned accordingly.

Public pensions really have been a pyramid scheme: rather than setting the money aside and investing it properly, the Government has simply channelled so-called pensions payments into general expenditure and paid out current pension commitments from the common pot.

A private sector Ponzi scheme collapses when it “runs out of suckers”, the inflow of new cash dries up, and it can no longer make payments to investors because there’s no actual capital or business at the heart of it.

With an ever-expanding aging population and a shrinking band of working-age people, over-extended welfare systems across the West risk going the same way: there won’t be enough coming in to meet the Government’s commitments and there’s no discrete fund to service them.

If the Government doesn’t find some way of bringing unfunded commitments like pensions under control, the only alternative would seem to be mass immigration – to which older voters are disproportionately opposed – or some combination of punitive tax rates on the young and an eye-watering assault on the rest of the welfare state.

This would be supplemented, as I’ve covered elsewhere, by the weaving of a social straightjacket designed to make citizens less expensive to keep.

(Another form of inter-generational inequity, from a libertarian perspective, as people who enjoyed lives of cheap beer and indoor smoking deny it to those that follow.)

All of which the young would have to endure because their elders, having mortgaged them already, have promised themselves more of their money.

There’s no easy out. It seems unlikely that the nation would actually tolerate the measures needed to accommodate our current unfunded commitments within the bounds of sensible public finance, which means that future governments are almost certainly going to bail on some of the promises of their predecessors.

Doing so will be politically difficult and will hurt people – just look at the current difficulties over the female pension age.

Whilst it will be the fairer of two horrible options, it will still not be a fair thing to do. Millions of people stand to have decades of expectations upended and face less comfortable retirements than they had planned on.

No matter that some of them may have been gullible, or incurious, or even greedy, every investor in a pyramid scheme is a victim. The guilty parties are those that create them and profit from them – whether that profit is stored in a Bermuda bank account or the nation’s ballot boxes.

Henry is the Assistant Editor at Conservative Home. Follow him on Twitter: @HCH_Hill

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Writing in The Times, Tim Montgomerie has penned a staunch defence of the sugar tax – or at least, the principle behind it – from what he calls “small-state fundamentalists”.

These are people who, by his own description, believe that “the state to be small and humble about intervening in the boardroom, bedroom and kitchen”. In other words, people like me.

For the purposes of this argument, let’s set aside the de-legitimising hyperbole of “fundamentalists”. Let us ignore too the fiercely contested evidence that such taxes have the desired effect and the counter-claims about their deeply regressive impact on poor people.

What I want to examine is Montgomerie’s suggestion that such measures are, in fact, “small state”.

His argument runs thus: prohibition, or gradations thereof, reduce the harmful impact of a thing (assume, for the moment, that this is actually true). Therefore, you need to spend less taxpayers’ money on the consequences, hire fewer nurses, and so on. Lo, the state is shrunken.

As a sincere appeal to “libertarians” – as all who oppose sugar taxes must surely be (by his reasoning) – it misses the point completely.

To classical liberals and those who share at least some of their instincts, shrinking the state is not the ultimate point. The ultimate point is freeing people to make their own decisions, govern their own lives, captain their own souls.

The size of the state, in material terms, is a fairly good indicator of the extent to which it interferes in the lives of its citizens. But it is not the only measure.

Tobacco duty, for example, raises funds – far more, in fact, than smoking-related illnesses cost the state. Yet it is nonetheless a choice-restricting policy.

Not necessarily because it reduces tobacco consumption, which is very price inelastic, but because of the opportunity cost of the additional funds the Government takes which the citizen might otherwise have spent pursuing their own interests and pleasures – in short, enhancing their life as they choose.

A free market in tobacco may require the hiring of more nurses and the purchase of more chemo machines, but that remains the more liberal choice – and thus the preference of liberals. We believe that a moral welfare state is a enabling, not prohibitive. A safety net, and not a straightjacket. Even if that is more expensive, and leaves the state ‘bigger’ in raw, material terms.

What, then, might a true “small-state fundamentalist” look like? Much like a man who would cut the material state at all costs, and would consign the people to tighter bonds than ever on the proviso that they were more cost-effective.

It would take just such a fundamentalist, in fact, to find small-government merit in the sugar tax.

Mr Hill has written a follow up piece for CapX on this subject, arguing that a Sugar Levy moves the welfare state from a safety net to a straightjacket

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Before I start, a question: do we really need an article explaining why it’s OK to take out members of a powerful, clerical fascist militia that’s terrorising several countries?

It seems we do.

In my first piece for Conservative for Liberty (which you can read right here) I set out why I was a Conservative, and why I felt a staunch belief in individual liberty was fundamentally compatible with Conservatism.

But as a liberty-conscious chap, I think that killing ISIS fighters is fine. I also think that coming out against doing so makes both liberals and the things liberals cherish – like human rights, and so on – look utterly ridiculous.

The basic liberal argument against taking out terrorists as I understand it is that ISIS, much like Somali pirates and the IRA before them, aren’t a state. Thus we can’t declare war on them, and so the formal rules of war don’t apply.

Therefore, the thinking goes, we should treat them as ordinary criminals, not combatants. They have the right to a fair trial, a jury of their peers, and so on.

They might have gone to Syria and started posing with AK 47s in ISIS-controlled territory, but the standard of proof for criminal cases is “beyond reasonable doubt”. Can we be sure that they weren’t, for example, “in Syria to work on their tan or on an unfortunately-timed trip to the Palmyra Visitors’ Centre”?

Isn’t our failure to grant them the full protection of British law, just because they’re in Syria, nothing more than an updated version of the “it’s different in Africa” justification used to justify the murder of Mau Mau prisoners in British Kenya in the past?

No. The answer is no.

There’s a fundamental, qualitative difference between killing terrorists in a combat situation and doing so once they’re in custody (as was the case with the Mau Mau). In the latter instance, the suspect is under our control and has been made safe. There is no reason the law should not proceed normally.

But an ISIS fighter in a warzone, or a pirate vessel in the Gulf of Aden, is not in our custody. They’re armed and actively engaged in an act of terror. Killing in those circumstances parallels much more closely with the police shooting an armed criminal who poses a threat to others.

That’s an area in which we grant the security forces operational discretion. Investigations may be conducted and even charges levelled after the fact, but the presumption of innocence rests with those upholding the law, not the armed criminals.

How would a trial for the likes of Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin even work? They obviously wouldn’t be present to hear the charges or defend themselves – a further grotesque violation of British justice! Perhaps we could have the drones delivering court summons.

The burden of evidence placed on the Crown in a criminal trial – “beyond reasonable doubt” – is deliberately very heavy. But it’s designed for circumstances where the police and prison system can make sure a suspect is no threat to the public and perform a thorough investigation.

Syria is not a theatre in which British law enforcement can operate. We can’t arrest these men, nor can we interview their victims or collect DNA samples from the scenes of their crimes.

And forget complaints about extra-judicial execution – our legal system hasn’t permitted judicial execution for any reason, including treason, since 1998. The European Convention on Human Rights forbids it.

So even a guilty verdict – which would be very hard to secure – wouldn’t actually justify a drone strike unless that drone was delivering a prison sentence. Perhaps we could equip them with cages, or lassos.

The court could licence the use of lethal force against an ISIS fighter, of course, but as that isn’t required to take down a school shooter or bank robber the result is that we’d be giving the warriors of a religious army greater legal protections than ordinary armed criminals on our own shores

How’s that for “but it’s different in Syria”?

Drone strikes haven’t been adopted as an alternative to arresting and trying these people. They’ve been adopted as an alternative to doing nothing.

That, really, is what the people piously invoking Magna Carta and Human Rights really need to clarify. Yes, it would be lovely if we could treat ISIS militiamen as ordinary criminals, bring them in quietly and lock them up.

But if we can’t do that – and let’s be clear, in this instance we can’t do that – what should we do?

In way too many instances, I get the impression that the answer is either “nothing” or some vacuous nonsense about “peace”.

This is of a piece with the liberal fixation of applying things like human rights in wildly excessive and inappropriate ways – a phenomenon skewered on CfL here – which has caused the words “human rights” to be held in such contempt by so much of the public.

Most people are far too sensible to buy for one moment that every member of ISIS needs a jury trial before we kill them. Insisting otherwise makes us, our beliefs and our hallowed documents look ridiculous, nothing more.

I’m not the cheering sort. But if word comes that a drone has taken out Mohammed Emwazi – aka ‘Jihadi John’, that guy from the beheading videos – I will be smiling.