Rishi Sunak seems serious about stopping the Channel boats

So long as the extensive pre-briefing of the Illegal Migration Bill turns out to be a reasonably accurate reflection of its contents, things are looking up for those of us who rank ‘stopping the boats’ as one of our top political priorities.

Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman are finally about to launch a piece of legislation that appears sufficiently broad ranging and radical to have a major impact if it can be steered onto the statue book without being emasculated by parliamentary rebellions in the Commons and especially the House of Lords.

There will be other obstacles it will have to surmount even as statute law in order to achieve its aim – principally legal challenges alleging non-compliance with the existing human rights framework – but at least it amounts to a serviceable plan to destroy the incentive for anyone to pay a people trafficker for a place in a dinghy across the English Channel.

The main features of the plan – a legal ‘duty to remove’ for the Home Secretary, standard detention of illegal arrivals rather than the provision of hotel accommodation, the barring of illegal arrivals even from claiming asylum, the standard and rapid removal of them either to their country of origin or a safe third country – all get to the heart of dismantling the ‘pull factor’ that has encouraged so many migrants to try their luck in a boat.

As someone who frequently drew attention to the deficiency of the Tory response to the small boats phenomenon under Boris Johnson and Priti Patel, it would be ungracious not to acknowledge that this new Bill is serious where the legislative approaches of that pair only amounted to tinkering at the edges.

Indeed, as far back as August 2020, I wrote an article for this site urging:

‘Universal detention of asylum applicants and a commitment not to allow any failed asylum-seeker to live in our society will have to be components of such a new approach… Maybe long-term offshore accommodation for those refusing to return to their country of origin will need to be part of the mix.’

Johnson never got round to any of that. Sunak proposes to do it all. And more. For another feature of the new legislation is reported to be something else that serious sceptics of the outdated global framework on asylum-seeking have long proposed. That is the ending of the uncapped obligation of the United Kingdom to accept anyone reaching our shores who qualifies as a refugee according to the global standard.

There are tens of millions of such people, perhaps even hundreds of millions. And their propensity to launch long-range voyages in pursuit of permanent settlement in wealthy and peaceful countries is on a steep upwards trajectory. We have seen in recent years that Britain, given its chronic shortage of social housing, has been unable to cope with tens of thousands of asylum-seekers a year to the point that community relations in many towns are now under immense strain.

So switching from the current Hunger Games challenge for persecuted people to get to our shores to a proactive approach that will see Britain select a capped number of the most deserving refugees from designated UN camps near war zones – including a high proportion of women and children among those selected – is essential.

Can Sunak’s new approach successfully negotiate its own obstacle course? It could go either way. He says he believes the UK should stay within the European Convention on Human Rights and its supervising court in Strasbourg. Yet his commitment to stop the boats, set out as one of his five core pledges, is almost unqualified. So presumably he hopes Strasbourg judges will read the runes and understand that if they do intrude and overrule him then our departure will swiftly follow.

My personal assessment is that Sunak would indeed do that and has become that rarest thing on this issue: a technocratic advocate of system change, convinced by head rather than heart of the need to alter the functioning of the British state in this regard.

Oddly, his biggest hurdle is probably not the capacity of human rights lawyers, unelected legislators in the Lords or the metropolitan media to kill his new Bill, but the disinclination of the British public to believe in it.

Under any reasonable reading of events, the Sunak approach will not have yielded much in the way of improvements on the ground a year from now. By the time of the next election he will still be asking the electorate – which overwhelmingly wants a tougher asylum regime – to believe in his particular version of Motherhood and Apple Pie.

Yet after so many years of broken Tory promises on both illegal and legal immigration – many of them broken by Boris Johnson – why would the mass of the migration-sceptic electorate be swayed by anything any Tory leader says on this issue? How ironic it would be and what a bitter pill to swallow if an actual serviceable plan was to sink under the weight of past betrayals?

If Keir Starmer wins the next election he will scrap the Sunak approach, fall back on camouflage waffle about cracking down on people-smuggling gangs and ensuring new safe routes. And the number of people conning their way to a life in Britain by abusing the asylum system will continue to skyrocket, with all the baleful consequences that implies for our rapidly unravelling society.