For Priti Patel, the hard work is only just beginning

Priti Patel is the sort of determined no-nonsense figure who tends to ruffle feathers, to say the least. As with recent accusations of bullying and perceptions of her behaviour, for which she apologised (sort of), her statements on immigration are usually controversial if not divisive, and if not deliberately provocative. Sometimes, she says, her own outlook and the attacks she attracts are influenced by her own background as the daughter of an Asian family expelled like so many by President Amin of Uganda in 1972. She gives no quarter. She takes great comfort from the 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2019 general election as her mandate to implement what she takes to be the people’s attitude towards migration.

That doesn’t mean that everything that emanates from her Home Office is automatically wrong-headed or impractical. Brexit, the loss of security for Hong Kong citizens, and the flow of migrants making their way across the English Channel in flimsy dinghies mean that immigration policy has to change. The New Plan for Immigration she has unveiled seems enough to keep even her substantial tram of civil servants occupied for some years. She has radical proposals, but almost concealed beneath the hardline rhetoric about life sentences for people smugglers, Patel has summarily scrapped the cornerstone of Conservative immigration policy for the past decade – the target, perhaps casually arrived at, to limit migration to the UK to the “tens of thousands”. She has buried it.

Apart from the “points-based” migration system replacing the old EU obligations for freedom of movement, Patel says her new plan for immigration has three objectives: to increase the fairness and efficacy of our system so that we can better protect and support those in need of genuine asylum; to deter illegal entry into the UK, thereby breaking the business model of criminal trafficking networks and protecting the lives of those they endanger; to remove more easily from the UK those with no right to be here.

All will be easier said than done.

First, Patel faces the enormous technical challenge of designing an IT system for her universal electronic visa, applicable to anyone entering the UK who is not a British or Irish passport holder. The track record of the British state in major IT projects is well known and unhappy, and the Home Office’s various failings in administering asylum applications, going back to John Major’s government represent a very unhappy folk memory for a department once disparaged by its own secretary of state, John Reid, as not fit for purpose.

Second comes international law and treaty obligations. As with a recent relaxation of visa rules for Indian citizens, future post-Brexit trade deals may also bring new freedoms for people to move from and to the UK to study and work. Such freedoms may not be what everyone who voted for Brexit had in mind.

Moreover, the plan’s vague ambition to send asylum seekers back to third countries they passed through – principally France – may be illegal under the 1951 Refugee Convention and, in any case, the French government is in no mood to take them back. The UK Supreme Court and the International Court may yet thwart Patel’s plans. People who arrive in the UK as refugees seeking asylum are not “illegal immigrants”.

Third is politics. Though it is difficult to outflank Patel from the right, the likes of the semi-retired Nigel Farage and various obsessives on social media will always find sufficient images of pitiful humanity washing up on the south coast as evidence of failure and that she is in fact soft on immigration. On balance, and unhappily for many, such critics are more of a worry than her critics on the progressive side of politics.