When I wrote about the small boats phenomenon on this site last November, 23,000 people were recorded as having entered the country irregularly by that route in 2021 last year. That was a Government estimate. The real figure will have been larger. As I write this morning, the total this year to date is about 40,000.
Seven in 10 are men between the ages of 18 and 39. More than half originate from three countries: Albania, Afghanistan and Iran. They are arriving from Europe, which wasn’t a place of persecution when I last looked, and specifically from France. Most are coming in boats commandeered by criminal gangs.
They tend to claim asylum after they arrive in Britain. About half obtain it. Enforced returns of all claimaints refused asylum fell by 18 per cent last year. The total number of asylum applications to last June was about 63,000. The pattern in recent years has been that applications via small boats have grown and those from elsewhere have fallen.
These arrivals make a mockery of British border control in general, of the use of safe and legal routes in particular, and of the refugees who apply regularly by those routes – all nine of them, five country-specific, targeting applicants from Afghanistan, Hong Kong and Ukraine.
The choice is clear. Britain either has border control or it doesn’t. If Opposition politicians and the country’s left wants open borders, then they should come clean and say so. If they don’t, then they should produce an alternative policy to the Government’s.
The only plausible one advanced is to allow applications from abroad. Some of those who seek to arrive via small boats would doubtless apply from France. But there is no reason to believe that all of them would. The gangmasters have stumbled across a discovery: buy a small craft, fill it with people, make them pay – and, hey presto! You have a new means of entering Britain.
There may be a relationship between lorry and boat entries, with the latter rising when the former fall, but the long and short of it is a new problem for British border control. Better co-operation with France would help. But in the last resort we have to police our own borders, as any independent country must do.
In a world of mass international travel, refugee conventions designed in another age, and the obligations that arise from them, allowing applications from abroad would invite the prospect of a mass of new applications – with no halt to the small boats in any event. And there is a limit to the number of refugees that any county can take.
Hence Rishi Sunak’s remarkable policy platform during the summer’s Conservative leadership election, in which he proposed tackling refugee admissions from first principles. He proposed in a ten point plan for immigration that Parliament should create an annual cap on the number of refugees accepted via safe and legal routes.
This would be inconsistent with our international commitments – and the only sensible course for government to take if it wants a policy that controls our borders and takes refugees in a manageable way, aligning border control, our moral obligations, pressure on housing in particular, and public opinion.
The last half of the fourth term of a Conservative Government, with no manifesto authority for such a policy, is an unpromising background against which to deliver it, but the Prime Minister can make a start – for example, by making it clear that the European Convention on Human Rights, the Refugee Convention and our present international obligations are on the table.
This would be unacceptable to a blob of lawyers, lobbyists, quangocrats, civil servants and others who either have a stake in the present system, are ultimately willing to live with a loss of border control, or both. Bits of it are already trying to pick apart the Government’s Rwanda scheme in the courts. Other bits of it are briefing and leaking against Suella Braverman.
It is tempting to operate solely on the principle that my enemy’s enemy in my friend, and that for ConservativeHome all Tory politicians must be friends – and so side unambiguously with the Home Secretary, who is undoubtedly on the side of the angels in seeking to re-establish British border control and make it work.
But the question, at least for me, isn’t whether Braverman’s heart is in the right place but whether or not her head is thinking clearly – in other words, whether or not the policies she is advancing will help to solve the small boats problem. I believe that the jury is out.
It was absurd for Liz Truss to force her resignation for acting as most of her other colleagues act by having Government information on private systems – a practice allowed in the relevant guidelines. There is no reason why a Tory politician, in this case Braverman, shouldn’t consult another one, in his case John Hayes.
Nor why she shouldn’t seek advice from Policy Exchange. Next up is the Manston controversy. The Home Secretary says that since she took office over 30 new hotels have been agreed to, that she has always followed legal advice, and that it is “simply not true” to suggest that she has “blocked the procurement of hotels or alternative accommodation”.
In the Commons on Monday, Roger Gale claimed that Braverman “took the policy decision not to commission further accommodation”, which is not quite the same thing. She insists that in the last resort she wasn’t willing to let asylum seekers loose on the streets of Kent, and that’s that.
During the same session, the Home Secretary described events on the south coast as an “invasion”. To some, this is no more than the truth. To others, it’s the use of inflammatory language. I side with the latter, for what it’s worth. And inflammatory language can end in real flames. I write in the wake of a man attempting to firebomb an immigration centre in Dover.
Those who find my argument unpersuasive may nonetheless ponder where Braverman’s words lead. She told the Commons that “the system is broken” and that “illegal migration is out of control”. So be it. What’s she going to do to repair that system? To get illegality under control? Will Britain leave the ECHR? The Refugee Convention?
The Home Secretary seems willing to follow through. But until or unless the Government does so, she’s in danger of arousing great expectations that aren’t realised – so leading to a further cycle of disillusion with politicians and a willingness to turn to extremists. Her political purpose is a passionate one, but does it also have limited scope?
Braverman told the Conservative Party Conference earlier this month that it was her “dream” and “obsession” to see a photograph on the front page of the Daily Telegraph of a flight taking off for Rwanda carrying illegal migrants. But there is much more to politics than getting a hit in the Telegraph or the Daily Mail or even ConservativeHome.
Politics is losing its sense of vision. On the one hand, a blob and the lobby pursue Braverman dementedly, so treating small boats themselves as secondary when they should be primary, as BBC news leads its bulletins with the Matt Hancock tragicomedy.
On the other, the Government is only part of the way to a coherent asylum policy. To complete the journey, it would have to go where Sunak pointed, and leave the Refugee Convention. Until or unless it does, the fate of our border controls hangs in the balance. Which matters much, much more than cheering or booing a single politician.