The failure to deport any illegal migrants at all on the first designated flight to France yesterday under the agreement the government struck with France in August may be due to bad luck rather than bad management. This is still bad news for the nation; the smuggling gangs, far from being smashed by a complacent Keir Starmer, will now be airily reassuring clients that their investment is safe because, whatever the Home Office says, they are most unlikely to be sent back to France. However, in the longer term this is much worse news for Labour.
Labour are largely hamstrung here by their own ideology
When the agreement for migrant returns was trumpeted amid manly hugs between Emmanuel Macron and Starmer, anyone who read the small print could see that it was largely meant for show. The numbers involved were fairly minuscule compared with those arriving and France had in practice a virtual veto over any proposed deportee. The agreement excluded any undesirable who was a threat to public order on either side of the Channel, or who had any legal proceedings outstanding against expulsion. It was ‘one in, one out’ and to add insult to injury, our taxpayers had to pick up the tab for the whole wretched caboodle.
Nevertheless, memories are short, and many voters will not have read the small print. Suitably announced from Downing Street, a small but reliable trickle of returns would not only have deterred at least some would-be Channel migrants. It would also have done wonders for the government’s currently dismal reputation: seeing the beginning of the process of return, at least some wavering electors might have felt reassured that Labour was serious about the open borders problem and had made a start on dealing with it.
That avenue is, however, now closed off. True, a handful of unsuccessful migrants may possibly be removed later this week – even though there are people, including left-wing politicians, protestors with little regard for legalities, and lawyers instinctively disinclined to robustly challenge the motives of any soi-disant asylum seeker, who can be trusted to try every wrecking tactic in the book. But whatever happens, this episode will now be seen by voters as yet another cunning wheeze dreamt up by a hapless administration which, like so many others, promptly came unstuck at the seams.
But it’s not only the government’s competence on the line. There also remain doubts as to whether its heart is truly in dealing with the migrant problem. True, senior Labour politicians have in the last few months been suggesting a willingness to take a harder line on migration and abuse of the asylum system. Nevertheless, their statements exude the impression that they emanate not from any deep commitment to preserving our borders but rather from a feeling that this is a sales pitch that must be gone through in order to persuade parts of a deeply sceptical electorate.
And this brings us to the obstacle that few in government dare mention: the ECHR and the human rights system that goes with it. For better or worse we have in this country a very liberal human rights bar, from which many immigration judges are drawn, and a tradition of a remarkably wide reading of human rights provisions, which is remarkably generous to those claiming that if sent abroad they will be mistreated in some way. It is fairly clear that so long as this remains, it will make very difficult our efforts to deal with immigration abuses.
Unfortunately Labour are largely hamstrung here by their own ideology. The leadership, including Keir Starmer and Attorney-General Lord Hermer, have irrevocably committed themselves to wholehearted support for the ECHR. And one suspects that this is a feeling which, intellectually, many ministers share. Front benchers such as Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood have very noticeably limited themselves to suggesting, vaguely, that something could be done about the over-wide interpretation of ECHR without being very clear about what or committing themselves to anything in particular.
This is Labour’s existential problem. They are stuck between an electorate which wants something done about immigration urgently and is pretty unsentimental about calling for the removal of those whom we do not want here even if they might be ill-treated elsewhere, and on the other side, the party’s intellectual leaders with their inconsistent commitment to the ECHR. So long as it continues to try to please both sides, it will lose ground. Other parties, meanwhile, have been more sensible. The Tories are inching towards the position that if necessary we must be prepared to abandon the ECHR, and significantly, Reform has unequivocally said that it will do just that.
Indeed, Reform may well have even more reason to rejoice at yesterday’s deportation fiasco than at the big news of Danny Kruger’s accession. In the long term, it may secure them a good deal more solid votes from fed-up voters in Middle Britain who before might have given Labour the benefit of the doubt but saw yesterday’s events as the last straw.
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