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Yvette Cooper has given up trying to stop the boats

The home secretary’s border security bill is an admission of powerlessness – and the attorney general has confirmed it, writes John Rentoul

Thursday 30 January 2025 11:53 EST
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The only way to stop the small boats coming across the Channel would be for Emmanuel Macron to allow the British to return their occupants to France. That is not something that the French president is willing to do, because he would appear to be giving in to Britain.

Nothing else will work. Some of the more drastic policy options might have a limited deterrent effect. The Rwanda scheme might have put a few migrants off attempting the crossing, and a few who were already in the UK did go to Dublin because they didn’t want to risk being deported to Kigali.

But the number that could have been sent to Rwanda, a few hundred out of the tens of thousands of small-boat arrivals, would never have deterred the majority of those intending to make the crossing. These are people who are prepared to take the risk of drowning to get to the UK – the small chance that they might end up in Rwanda instead would not have been enough to persuade them to give up.

Anything less than that, therefore, will have less effect. Confiscating the mobile phones of new arrivals, for example, even if it is called a “new counterterror-style power”, is unlikely to make any difference whatsoever.

The border security bill introduced in the Commons today by Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, is an admission of defeat. She and Keir Starmer had hoped at one point, just as Rishi Sunak had before them, to negotiate a deal with France that would allow the processing of asylum seekers to take place there. Again, that would have worked only if France had agreed to take back rejected claimants who then tried to cross the Channel, and so, again, it came to nothing.

Instead, the home secretary is reduced to a feeble bit of legislative window-dressing, all puffed up in tough language about smashing the gangs. She says the bill will “transform the ability of law enforcement agencies to take earlier and more effective action against organised immigration crime”.

It will do no such thing, and even if it did, it would do no good: the problem is not the gangs, but the urgent desire of so many people to make it to the UK. Cooper and Starmer’s rhetoric almost implies that criminals are forcing people onto dangerous dinghies at knifepoint, whereas if the use of knives is threatened, it is to try to prevent too many desperate people from getting on a boat.

The people-smugglers are awful people preying on human desperation, but they are responding to demand, not creating it – and for every arrest of someone buying dinghy parts in Belgium, there will be another lowlife ready to take their place.

It looks as if the only element of deterrence that Cooper is hoping to deploy is to raise the number of returns. The Labour government has made a start on raising the number of people removed from this country from the low level to which it was allowed to fall under the Conservatives. The home secretary boasted today that 16,000 people have been removed since she took over, but this is some way below the 45,000 a year that were removed under the last Labour government. Perhaps she hopes that today’s bill will give the impression of action while she gets the numbers up.

This is important, not least because in principle, people who have no right to be here should be removed. But she has to be realistic about the deterrent effect it will have, because most small-boat arrivals will continue to be granted asylum. The home secretary is in an impossible position, because – as the Conservatives discovered – there are no easy answers. They were prepared to threaten to defy the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), and still couldn’t come up with a plan that worked.

Even so, I thought it was a mistake for Richard Hermer, the attorney general, to tell the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe that he wouldn’t even consider standing up to the ECHR: “I’d like to be very clear: the new UK government will never withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, or refuse to comply with judgments of the court, or requests for interim measures given in respect of the UK.”

Of course Britain should support the Convention, but it has to reserve the right to set it aside in exceptional circumstances. Keir Starmer, Lord Hermer’s fellow barrister, has described the small boats as a “national security” threat.

By taking away even the possibility that the British government might adopt a robust attitude towards rulings by the Strasbourg court, Hermer confirms that he and Cooper have simply given up trying to stop the boats.

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