It is often said that hard cases make bad law – and the thought behind this cliché is surely right. It isn’t possible to construct general rules that will work well for most people most of the time by thinking of the most difficult and exceptional cases.
This is as true in the case of rules about migration as it is in any other field. One has to start by asking what rules are likely to produce sensible results most of the time.
Once one poses the question this way, some of the answers become pretty clear. I suspect that the overwhelming majority of our fellow countrymen would agree with the view that our welfare system is not capable of withstanding the financial strain that would be involved in making benefit payments to anybody and everybody who might wish to migrate to the UK.
So it is perfectly sensible to have a general rule that, before people can be given entry to the UK from other countries outside the EU, they have to show that they can support themselves without recourse to public funds.
But there are, of course, other things that need to be taken into account when designing a set of rules about migration. And one of these is the general principle that British citizens ought to have the right to a family life with the partner of their choice. This is why the system also generally permits people to enter the country if they are (genuinely) married to UK citizens.
But what happens if these two principles come into conflict, or appear to come into conflict with one another?
This is where you hit the hard cases. Perfectly sensible general rules do not always look so sensible when a particular case comes to light.
What is the solution? Another set of rules for deciding how to solve conflicts between the rules? A new task force or quango? Surely not.
What is required when one hits a hard case is a bit of commonsense and human sympathy exhibited by the officials called upon to make decisions under the rules.
I am afraid my experience over the last 13 years has been that such commonsense and human sympathy is not always shown in resolving the hard cases. A surprisingly large part of the activity of a constituency MP consists of trying to help particular constituents obtain these two magic ingredients from the bureaucracy