Boris Johnson has only just noticed that Priti Patel is not up to the job

Editorial: The problem of small boats crossing the Channel is not a new one – Conservative immigration policy has been failing for some time

Saturday 20 November 2021 16:30 EST
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Priti Patel meets a Border Force team in Dover
Priti Patel meets a Border Force team in Dover (PA)

Eleven years after the Conservatives entered government, and two and a half years after Boris Johnson entered Downing Street, the home secretary has described the asylum system as “dysfunctional” and the prime minister has ordered an urgent review.

All prime ministers are ill-prepared for some problems, but the current one seems particularly bad at anticipating things that should have been glaringly obvious. The problem of people arriving in the UK by small boats across the Channel has been visible for years, and especially since coronavirus struck 20 months ago.

It was then, with traffic through the Channel tunnel much reduced, that more people seeking unauthorised entry to the country switched to the riskier method of making the 21-mile crossing in small inflatable boats.

Boris Johnson, who had just seen off the threat of Nigel Farage in the 2019 election, should have been alerted to a new threat by the sudden appearance of videos of the Brexit Party leader on the beaches of Kent. Mr Farage may not be good at winning Westminster elections, but he has a good instinct for public opinion. He saw the chance to exploit a highly visible flaw in Johnson’s promise to “take back control” of immigration policy.

The number of arrivals was not at that time significant, but the legal problems of stopping them were already apparent. Ever since, the Home Office has seemed stuck in a loop of Priti Patel demanding that something be done while her officials explain patiently why it is not possible.

There are no international waters in the Channel, so as soon as a boat makes it halfway across, it becomes the UK’s responsibility. No civilised nation can allow people to drown, and international law does not allow boats to be pushed back into French waters without the cooperation of the French government.

That leaves two options. One is to pay the French to police their beaches to prevent the boats setting off; the other is to set up an expensive and oppressive machinery of detention and processing. Neither is likely to succeed without the cooperation of other countries, especially France. Even if the French wanted to, or wanted to allow British border staff to do it, policing a 100-mile coastline is a challenge.

As for detention, even if it could be made humane – and the scandal of existing “removal centres” casts doubt on that – it would require the UK to speed up the processing of asylum claims, but also, crucially, the cooperation of countries to which unsuccessful asylum seekers would be returned.

Neither Mr Johnson nor Ms Patel seems to have thought this through, possibly hoping that draconian headlines and news stories about detention centres in Albania, Rwanda or St Helena would have a deterrent effect on migrants who are desperate to come to the UK.

Only now has it suddenly dawned on the prime minister that his home secretary is not up to the task, and so he has ordered Steve Barclay, the new minister for troubleshooting at the Cabinet Office, to carry out a review. Of course there are no easy answers to the problems of asylum policy, but that is what government is for, and this one is failing.

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