Whisper it, but the Tories’ immigration plans are working
Anyone looking closely at the Rwanda plan will quickly realise one thing. It’s not simply about preventing migrants arriving in this country, tearing up their documentation, indistinctly mouthing the word “asylum,” and presenting the Home Secretary in many cases with a fait accompli. The final passing of the Safety of Rwanda Act last week was also, and perhaps more importantly, a matter of psychology.
This applies in two ways. First, the thinking is that however many people we actually send to Kigali, the prospect of being whipped smartly away to await a decision elsewhere will weigh with many would-be irregular migrants thinking of the UK as a destination. Second, it is an attack on the idea that even those living in safe countries could have an automatic right to arrive without permission in a nations many thousands of miles away and then insist on staying there until they have been refused asylum and their lawyers have exhausted all legal remedies. The aim is to make the opposite – that a country should have the right to take decisions in a different way – something sayable.
Interestingly, Rishi may be some way towards achieving both these objectives.
As regards the first, which may have been having some effect anyway, the great and the good in Ireland – ironically in large measure because of borderline hostility towards what they see as the bully across the water – have given it a big boost. Six weeks ago, the Irish High Court barred the Irish government from returning two would-be migrants to Britain precisely because they might face onward travel to Rwanda.
And a few days ago Simon Harris, the new Taoiseach, unwittingly supplemented the psychological effect by complaining of a stream of irregular migrants crossing the open border and bedding down in Dublin precisely in order to avoid a possible deportation to Kigali, with Britain refusing to take them back. The irony is tangible. Ireland, having supported the EU in its reluctance to take back Channel migrants from Britain now the Dublin Regulation is gone, finds itself in a similar bind. Even more ironically, the country used to posturing on the progressive moral high ground it is now reportedly considering rushing through a mirror image of the Safety of Rwanda Act, stating that Britain is a safe country. We await with interest the comments of the UK liberal establishment.
On the second point, Rishi has also scored rather better than one might expect. The House of Lords, after many members excoriated the Safety of Rwanda Bill as beyond the pale, has backed down. The Bill, approved by a majority of elected representatives, is now law.
It has of course been attacked. UN grandees Volker Türk and Filippo Grandi quickly said it set a dangerous precedent in retreating from the UK’s “proud history of effective, independent judicial scrutiny” (perhaps connected to its cutting back the scope for creative lawfare). And the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights Michael O’Flaherty, in previous life an Irish academic human rights activist and Eurocrat, talked of an “ongoing trend towards externalisation of asylum and migration policy in Europe, which is a matter of concern for the global system of protection of the rights of refugees.”
In both speeches, however, there is an element of resignation, and a realisation that the old consensus on refugees dating from the 1951 Refugee Convention may now be beginning to look like a dead duck. In cementing the idea that refugee policy is now a matter of legitimate discourse, Rishi has done the UK, and one suspects the world, a favour.
