Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O’Flynn

Rishi Sunak seems serious about stopping the Channel boats

(Photo: Getty)

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.

Sunak and Braverman are about to launch legislation that appears sufficiently broad ranging and radical to have a major impact

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

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