Labour are now making daily pronouncements on the latest policy area where the last government left things in a worse state than it let on. The latest is immigration. Yvette Cooper came to the Commons this afternoon to make a statement on border security. Even though she is now the Home Secretary, she sounded strikingly like she was still in opposition. She was the one responsible for that delay. Anyway, Cooper told the Commons that ‘I have reviewed the policies, programmes and legislation that we have inherited from our predecessors and I have been shocked by what I have found.’ The added: ‘Not only are there already serious problems but on current policies the chaos and costs will likely get worse.’
She repeatedly claimed that criminal gangs had been ‘allowed’ to take hold, and were operating ‘with impunity’. The security and enforcement arrangements are ‘too weak’, and ‘I’m extremely concerned that the high levels of danger that we have inherited are likely to persist through the summer’. We have, she said, ‘inherited asylum Hotel California: people arrive in the asylum system and they never leave’. She claimed that the previous government’s policy was ‘effectively an amnesty’ because of the scale of the backlog in processing asylum applications. The potential costs of asylum support over the next four years ‘if we continue down this track’ could be ‘an eye-watering £30 to 40 billion’, she claimed. Cooper also told the Commons that the previous government had planned to spend ‘over £10 billion’ on the Rwanda scheme and it had already cost taxpayers £700 million ‘in order to just send just four volunteers’.
This fits the template of all Labour government announcements at the moment: things are extremely bad, worse than we expected, and they are going to get worse over the next few months. The first statement is part of the strategy for winning the next general election by setting in stone a narrative about the Conservatives breaking everything, and the second is an attempt to buy some time from criticism as small boat arrivals continue to rise.
Only towards the end of her statement did Cooper switch to talking about what she, now in government rather than scrutinising the people in power, was going to do to change the situation. She listed new powers against organised immigration crime, replacing Rwanda with a ‘serious returns and enforcement programmes’ and increasing UK officers’ involvement in the Europol European migrant smuggling centre. ‘We need a proper system where rules are ’, she said. ‘There are no quick fixes to the chaos created over the last 14 years and it will take time to clear the asylum backlog, to bring costs down, to get new enforcement in place to strengthen our borders and prevent dangerous boat crossings.’ She later declined to accept the invitation of a Conservative MP to resign if small boat crossings are higher next summer than they are now. But at some point, her tone will have to switch from attack and critique of the last government, and onto defending what she is now doing.
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