One tries to find grounds for optimism about the resolve and capacity of Her Majesty’s Government in these testing times but there is none to be found in today’s deal with France on Channel migrants.
In fact, the wearily familiar outline of the agreement – yet more UK taxpayers’ money going to the French in return for more beach police patrols, better information-sharing, embedded UK officers working alongside them, blah blah blah – fits very neatly into the failed approach of Boris Johnson and Priti Patel.
Clearly having what Home Secretary Suella Braverman heralded as a ’40 per cent uplift in the number of French gendarmes patrolling the French beaches’ has the potential to reduce the cross-Channel traffic at the margins, and for a while.
It is easy to see what is in it for France
So long as the French honour their side of things, some migrants who would have been able to set off will be caught on beaches, have their dinghies burst and need to try their luck again a few days later. Which, of course, they will.
Were you to hold out the prospect of this year’s completely outrageous number of more than 40,000 illegal migrants crossing the Channel falling back in 2023 to last year’s shockingly unacceptable 28,000, no doubt Ms Braverman would bite your hand off.
It is easy to see what is in it for France – apart from another £63 million of British largesse. By becoming the primary volume control mechanism on illegal immigration into the UK, president Macron is gaining huge political leverage over Rishi Sunak.
Should Sunak wish to play hardball over a matter such as reform of the Northern Ireland Protocol, one raise of a Gallic eyebrow will remind him that record numbers of illegal arrivals on England’s southern coast could easily land on British beaches in an election year, if that’s how he wants to play things.
But it’s worse than that. The priority given by Sunak to reaching a deal with France indicates that he lacks the appetite to take alternative measures that would work but entail substantial establishment blowback both domestically and internationally.
When Sunak or his aides brief journalists that ‘there is no single thing to do’ to solve the issue they are wrong. By moving to standard offshore processing of arrivals while passing a law stating that nobody who arrives illegally will get to reside in the UK, the Government could completely break what it terms ‘the business model of the people traffickers’.
Almost nobody would pay a substantial sum to be taken across the Channel if they knew it meant ending up somewhere like Ascension Island awaiting transfer to a developing country willing to take them in return for a grant funded from the UK aid Budget.
But the Government won’t take such effective action because it might require withdrawal from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights and opting out of obsolete international accords about asylum that are proving completely unsustainable right across the continent of Europe. The British liberal establishment, including many self-styled ‘liberal’ Conservative politicians, would go into uproar. And Sunak lacks the political will for such a trial of strength.
So instead, he has opted to make Britain, which once prided itself on ‘ruling the waves’, dependent on France to stop the boats – more a vassal state than a vessel state.
The real tell-tale sign that this is all so much dressing of la fenetre can be discerned via a simple thought exercise: if France was really committed to stopping this racket it could do so at a fraction of the cost to itself, simply by agreeing to take back migrants picked up by the UK mid-Channel. There would be no need for it to devote precious gendarme hours to beach patrols.
Via use of drones and other intelligence-gathering techniques, the UK authorities manage to locate many of the dinghies and pick up the people in them at sea. Instead of being escorted into Dover, they could be returned to Calais, easily and efficiently, in under two hours.
A knock-on benefit for France of adopting such a simple returns agreement would be that the tent villages that have sprung up along its Channel coast would quickly disappear. The only reason they are there is as a base camp for an attempt on La Manche that currently proves successful in most cases.
And yet France will not agree to this. Not when Boris Johnson specifically asked for it, nor in today’s accord. Why not?
We will solve the Channel migrants issue by taking sovereign control of it or we will not solve it at all. Sunak’s Conservative party has opted for the latter course and it insults the British public by pretending otherwise.
Comments