The sheer weirdness that is Small Boats Week highlights the tension between the modern pace of the news and the stubbornly old-fashioned pace of actually governing.
Channel crossings are a matter of great public concern, and the Government wants to be seen to be doing something about it. Yet actually tackling the problem, if ever it is tackled, will take time.
The temptation to shout about passing the Illegal Migration Bill is obvious. But as I wrote last month, the more ministers hype it up the greater the pressure on it to deliver tangible results. Will it?
It’s simply too soon to say. In theory, it will reduce the frictional factors which drag out assessments, such as the current policy of freezing deportation efforts for anyone who makes a modern slavery claim (which creates a clear incentive to file spurious claims). But for every loophole closed, immigration lawyers will be diligently seeking out new ones.
Implementation is the rock on which all of this keeps foundering. In theory, the Rwanda scheme has been ruled legal, in principle – even June’s court defeat was on technical grounds, which the Government (and its Rwandan counterpart) could remedy.
But it doesn’t look as if the Home Office is optimistic about ever getting it fully operational; why else would Ascension Island be back in the headlines again? Use of this small Overseas Territory has been considered, and rejected, several times already. Why should it be any different this time?
Once again, it isn’t that setting Ascension Island up as an offshore processing centre is impossible. Objections raised in the feasibility study, such as “problems of inadequate power, water, and the absence of a hospital”, could be fixed by building that infrastructure.
That, however, is not the way things are done today. Modern British governments seem to much prefer indefinite revenue expenditure if it avoids the need to make difficult decisions about capital investment. For all the outrage and expense of putting asylum seekers and other illegal entrants up in hotels, ministers refuse still to bite the bullet and commission a proper, purpose-built detention estate.
Critics of Rishi Sunak’s approach will argue that he could have gone further; Policy Exchange called for a much more muscular bill, which would have required a more combative approach to the courts. Nothing in our constitution prohibits Parliament passing such a bill; with the Conservatives 20 points behind, some might argue: what have they got to lose?
Brexit ought to have taught the Right better than that. A major change to the United Kingdom’s constitutional order or international arrangements ought to be made by a government with a plan, a mandate, and time to see its programme through. Stumbling into ECHR reform with a divided party would not likely succeed, and might spur Labour to further entrenchment of the status quo if they win next year.
Instead, the Government chose a less confrontational approach in hope that this afforded a greater chance of securing concrete gains by the election. Even those that disagree should see that future demands for more far-reaching change to things such as the ECHR will be more credible if the Tories can claim to have tested to destruction Whitehall’s ability to get a grip on the problem under the present arrangements.
Ultimately, the problem of immigration policy for the Right is that at present far more people will the ends of bringing numbers down, but do not will the means; headline ambitions are announced, but the machine opposes itself at every turn, be that through clashing legal obligations that make enforcement impossible or, in the case of legal immigration, outsourcing the mission to the Home Office whilst other departments continue to advocate for higher numbers.
Unless and until a government is prepared to try and sell the means – both in terms of potentially controversial policies and major capital spending – this isn’t going to get solved. We’re not there yet.
(Although if the Government is going on the offensive against law firms which allegedly coach people to lie in asylum applications, it could do worse than offering a bounty for information that leads to successful action against an individual or practice, rather than relying on the occasional sting by the Daily Mail.)
Speaking of Labour, they are keen to punch this bruise. But whilst the Opposition have a lot of problems to point to, they are short on solutions.
Yvette Cooper highlights low caseworker numbers, but given the extremely straightened fiscal circumstances an incoming Labour government would face, it isn’t clear they would end up ploughing funding into the Home Office. Meanwhile their pledge to “clear the backlog and end hotel use by fast-tracking asylum decisions” could most swiftly be met, according to its own language, by waving people through until the queues are gone. Few voters exercised about this issue are likely to think that an actual solution.
For now, however, polls suggest voters are inclined to give the Opposition the benefit of the doubt, especially when held against the Conservatives’ record of over-promising and under-delivering on immigration. Absent a genuine breakthrough, Sunak will have to hope that the electorate start scrutinising Labour’s alternative more closely as the election looms – and decide to at least give the Government credit for trying.