There is nothing new under the sun. The idea of opening an asylum processing centre on the British overseas territory of Ascension Island has been knocking around for 20 years, but reports in today’s papers suggest it is suddenly all the rage again. Ministers are scrambling to find a ‘plan B’ in case the Supreme Court confirms the Appeal Court’s controversial view that the long-delayed Rwanda policy is unlawful.
Way back in 2005, the Conservatives made a commitment in their manifesto that ‘asylum seekers’ applications will be processed outside Britain’. In the run up to that year’s election, Mark Reckless, then a researcher at Conservative Central Office, conducted a scoping exercise to identify a site for overseas processing. Ascension Island came out top of his list. But it turned out that the answer to Michael Howard’s question to the electorate ‘are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ was ‘no’. The Tories lost the election, and the policy was later ditched by David Cameron.
The Ascension Island plan was revived three years ago by Priti Patel when she was a home secretary looking for a way to stem the flow of small boats. But the Treasury blocked it on cost grounds, ruling that the required investment in the island’s power supply and new desalination facilities would prove exorbitant.
That these financial worries have gone away is a measure of the priority the government has had to give to the small boats issue. It’s under massive pressure from those who voted Tory in 2019 but are not presently inclined to do so again. A month ago, on these very pages, I called for the Ascension plan to be revived to form the core of a new ‘Port Refuge’ policy that would offer indefinite shelter to illegal migrants well away from the UK, and would help find them permanent resettlement elsewhere.
It ill-behoves me to throw cold water on this idea now, but the iteration of Ascension now being looked at by Suella Braverman – Patel’s successor as Home Secretary charged with untangling this Gordian knot within the European human rights framework – appears to be somewhat different to the original plan.
Reports suggest that the island will only be used as a holding centre until a migrant’s asylum application is adjudicated back in the UK, and that applicants will come back to Britain for settlement if their applications are successful. It is unclear where those rejected will end up. The deterrent effect of being transported 4,000 miles from Kent to the mid-Atlantic will be much less pronounced with the prospect of permanent settlement in the UK – expressly ruled out under the Rwanda plan – still in the mix.
Yet a centre on Ascension would create superb pre-election optics for the government – an ongoing convoy of illegal migrants being taken to the middle of nowhere while do-gooding open borders advocates in the House of Lords and elsewhere emit helpful squeals of outrage. No doubt somebody would liken it to ‘Britain’s Guantanamo’, and it is not beyond the bounds that a left-wing peer would use the phrase ‘concentration camp’, either. The plan going ahead would also be an example of Rishi Sunak making good on his pledge to ‘strain every sinew’ to stop the boats. As such, it could form the platform for a credible Tory manifesto commitment next year to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights and other obsolete international agreements.
But will any of this be enough for Tory-leaning voters who have looked askance for years at failed ministerial efforts to get a grip on abuse of the asylum system? So long as Keir Starmer ensures his own frontbench oppose the Government in a low-key way on grounds of the ineffectiveness of its policies, rather than taking a pompous stand on the ethics of the matter, that seems doubtful.
Cynicism among Tory-leaning voters is now so heightened that it will surely take an actual breakthrough – a plummeting in illegal immigration via small boats – to win their approval. Rishi Sunak may say a lot of the right things about stopping the boats, but he has never yet quite convinced the Tory tribe that he is willing to brave the full wrath of the liberal establishment. If a facility is built on Ascension Island in the coming months – and I very much hope that it will be - then one can’t help thinking that it will be a different Conservative prime minister who ultimately ends up using it to decisive effect.
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