Ascension Island isn’t the answer to migration – ID cards might be

About a year from now there may well be a new government faced with a series of intractable problems – stagflation, the continuing damage caused by Brexit, and the strategic challenges posed by Russia and China. However, there is no issue more emotive and more apparently insoluble than migration, and in particular, the flow of desperate people making the dangerous journey in small boats across the English Channel. Today, more may arrive.

They are risking their lives; there have been tragedies; and there will no doubt be worse tragedies to come. The fact that the government are having to resort to more and more bizarre schemes – the ridiculous overcrowded barge off the coast of Dorset, and a new scheme to send people to the virtually uninhabited volcanic islet of Ascension, 1,000 miles from land – merely demonstrates the paucity of realistic, legally sound, practical options.

One of the few things that all involved do agree on is that the UK should try to “stop the boats”. It’s an ugly slogan, for sure, and so are the attitudes of some on the right, and the dehumanising talk of “illegals” and “invaders”; but it’s actually something that represents a rare consensus.

The problem is, obviously, how to do it. Or, to pitch it a little further into the future, how would Labour do it?

It is not entirely clear. Stephen Kinnock tells us that the infamous barge wouldn’t be decommissioned by an incoming Labour administration, or at least not immediately. They would end the Rwanda plan, which is more of a symbolic move than anything, given that it can’t process more than a few thousand refugees in a year. They’d crack down on the criminal gangs, just like the government is attempting to. They’d also try and get a returns agreement with the EU – with no sign that Brussels or Paris will be receptive.

There are questions about where Labour is going on this, but it is plainly not true, as Conservative ministers, distracting from their own abject failures claim, that Labour “has no plan”. Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, does have a plan, which she rehearses whenever she’s given the chance; but often these are obviously initiatives and ones that the government is already undertaking, albeit not always competently.

The first move proposed by Labour is to clear the huge backlog of asylum claims – something that, again in an unnoticed area of consensus – the government has been trying to do. This is the key to the problem of accommodation – more people with unprocessed claims means more hotel rooms, more unsuitable barges, ex-military camps, shanty-town tent cities and deportations to ever more unlikely locations.

The problem, for any party, is that the queue has now grown so large – about 74,000. The Refugee Council, a little disingenuously in my view, have calculated that for Rishi Sunak to deliver his claim that he is “on track” to clear the current asylum backlog “entirely by the end of the year”, some 10,630 backlog cases need to be resolved every month between now and December to meet his target. That equates to 354 cases a day, or one case every four minutes. You do the maths, as they say.

However, taking Cooper at her word, she will throw resources at it (if she can find them, ironically given the labour shortage) and reduce the pressure and costs of finding accommodation. One might wonder how Cooper will be able to find suitable staff for processing centres – it is skilled and stressful work – when Suella Braverman has not, but let us assume she can rustle them up.

The next step would be to regularise the flow via the famous “safe and secure routes”, away from the UK. Again, this has much to commend it, in theory, because it would mean a refugee in Africa, say, doesn’t have to try to claim asylum personally in the UK. A version of this has actually been used by the government with some success, in the various special Hong Kong, Syrian, Afghan and Ukraine schemes, which turned out to be relatively popular. Sunak’s idea is to extend these to other trouble spots, in collaboration with the UN High Commission for Refugees. But such schemes would be capped, according to what local authorities say they can cope with.

Labour’s scheme appears more open ended than Sunak’s and suffers from the common, convenient assumption that most of those claiming asylum are in fact economic migrants (to be deported) rather than “genuine” refugees who we always give shelter to. Yet the high proportion of successful claims indicates that the genuine refugees can far outweigh the chancers, and the numbers of genuine refugees fleeing for their lives from war, persecution, famine and climate change may well grow in the coming years, given our unstable world.

Numbers matter. If Labour decided to allow all the genuine refugees to come and settle in the UK, the situation would be practically difficult to sustain and politically pretty suicidal, given the temper of public opinion. If Labour didn’t operate a limitless approach, and thus implemented the kinds of cap the Conservatives are seeking to do, then they too would be faced with the possibility of extreme clandestine boat crossings by those who failed to get asylum by the new safe and secure routes.

These people – many genuinely fleeing war, remember – would surely still try to get to the UK, but this time would avoid giving themselves up to Border Force for processing, and instead land at night and melt into the countryside. Indeed they could also do this via overstaying a student or work visa. (This might also happen if the government ever do manage to succeed in implementing their current “deterrent” policies: Rwanda and inhumane barge conditions merely deter a desperate migrant from being detected by the authorities, and not from making the effort to get into Britain by any means possible.

Nations with open border policies, such as the Schengen group in the EU, have long ago found the answer to such challenges – compulsory identity cards carried at all times. This is of course the logical place where the Blair government ended up when David Blunkett was home secretary and trying to deal with this perennial asylum issue. It would certainly help the authorities monitor what may turn out to be an even larger flow of completely clandestine movements into the country caused by rationing migrants according to need. (That, indeed, is how the socialist principle is applied to the NHS; not everyone can be treated immediately, and there is a process of prioritisation).

A system of rationing and ID cards is probably inevitable, and far better that it should be implemented by Labour. Yet so outraged was the reaction across the political spectrum to Blunkett’s ideas, that they were shelved, never to be touched by a home secretary again.

The time will surely come, however, when Cooper will have to take another look at ID cards and a more restrictive approach than the one she has been advocating. The UK has always had immigration controls of one sort or another, and it will always need a policy that is both fair and commands public support. It ought also to be legal under the European Convention on Human Rights – something that is not obviously compatible with capping refugee numbers: no one said any of this is easy.

Looking forward, though, it is imperative that Labour get this right and take as much heat out of the debate as they can. Either Keir Starmer and Cooper do what it takes to build support for a humane, balanced policy; or, as we have seen elsewhere in Europe, they will leave the way clear for an even more populist right-wing party to exploit the issue at the election after next. That, actually, is the election that Starmer should be much more concerned about losing.