“Breaking news: Labour have managed to stop all illegal small boat crossings coming to the UK.”
Anyone who believes this is remotely true should probably check the calendar and see what day it is.
The Prime Minister’s illegal migration summit yesterday drew together all sorts of players to discuss ways they could collaborate to do things that most have them have already been doing. It was like an April Fools stunt a day early. My verdict is not tribalism, its realistic. This Government will not only failing to stop small boats it’s going to get far more. But one person seems to avoid the flak for this.
I’d love to be able to say Rishi Sunak’s now admittedly ‘too stark’ promise to ‘Stop the boats’ could have been realised entirely, but it wasn’t and we should acknowledge that despite reducing flows, we didn’t come near to actually ‘stopping the boats’. I know how difficult it is to do – having worked in the Home Office, and despite Reform’s glib illegal and unworkable ideas to tackle it.
We do however agree and frankly knew all along – Labour would be hopeless at it.
Rachel Reeves, Bridget Phillipson, Liz Kendall, Wes Streeting, Sir Keir Starmer and David Lammy have all faced, quite rightly a good deal of flak, from all directions, on key areas where Labour have turned out not to be delivering on their promises. This is either because there is always public focus on areas like the economy, health, and benefits, or because there are more holes than a Swiss cheese in certain policy announcements in education, welfare or relations with China, and the deal on the Chagos Islands.
Meanwhile within the secure borders of the Home Office Yvette Cooper has some how seemingly avoided the intensity of such scrutiny. This is odd, and this is excluding policing which is a growing target all of its own.
On small boat arrivals she is failing in all the ways, and for all the reasons, the Conservatives predicted she would. Meanwhile, The Conservatives ‘under new leadership’ (prepare to hear that a lot) have actually articulated policy on immigration, and despite the constant fire of “but you failed to tackle it”.
The case for the prosecution on Labour’s handling of the immigration issue is a strong one, and we are told immigration is a key issue for voters, and yet the Home Secretary seems to be walking through the raindrops when it comes to public and media scrutiny.
Her shadow, Chris Philp has been active on the subject, and leader Kemi Badenoch has certainly been talking about it, and offering new thinking, but if the party wanted a sign that it still needs get cut-through to the public this is one of those issues. Such thoughts on this topic are less mine and more a whisper of quiet concern at all levels of the party, probably connected to the threat from Reform.
“If Labour had come in and said ‘we don’t like the Rwanda policy, we’ve said so, but now it’s in place, we are going to pause, review and reshape it into something we are comfortable with’, and then started to use it, honestly? We’d have been stuffed”
So said a former Tory Home Office Minister to me some months ago.
Labour didn’t do that, and on day one, for all its flaws (far fewer than people made out) Rwanda was scrapped. On day one. They thought that was brilliant and continually claim ‘Rwanda didn’t work’. The truth is it only didn’t work because they cancelled it. It was functional and planes would have been leaving the UK from late June last year, but for their choice.
With the scrapping of the Rwanda scheme, now actively being looked at by other countries for exactly the same purpose, went the only deterrent that has been suggested or ever applied. The message was simple: ‘if you come to the UK illegally you won’t get to stay here”.
The deterrent blueprint was there in our returns agreement with Albania. It worked. Remember returns agreements? Those deals that Labour were going to roll out in abundance. So far, they’ve produced one with Iraq, which like the two big gang smashing operations they’ve boasted about, was already well under way before they came in.
And once the dust had settled and the new Government had simply relabelled the two year old, functioning, Small Boats Operational Command – the Border Security Command – as if it was new and better – they hired a former policeman, Martin Hewitt to head it.
One of the first things he said was that ‘smashing the gangs’ would only work if there was also ‘a deterrent’ – cue enormous groans of ‘we told you so’ from anyone who’d been working in the field for the previous two years.
Labour think ‘smashing the gangs’ is their own answer to the problem. It is a good idea – it’s just never been their idea. Inflatable boats, criminal money transfers, sub standard boat engines and criminal people smugglers were targeted, and seized by the UK in cooperation with other countries, with real results, for four times longer than Labour have been in power.
A deterrent tackles the demand, tackling gangs tackles the criminal supply chain. Hand in hand, slowly, too slowly, it does work. Either on its own doesn’t, but that’s what we’ve got.
And what has the ‘eye-rolling, this-is-terribly-serious’ Home Secretary now presided over? Small boat crossings up by twenty eight percent. Record numbers for the start of this year. Like the economy, their plans don’t work they way they claimed.
They didn’t smash the gangs they created incentives. The Irish Government are no longer complaining of migrants flocking to Dublin because ‘they don’t want to go to Rwanda’ – because nobody is.
Oh and the cost?
Yes, Rwanda did cost hundreds of millions, but the bill for keeping the people the UK can’t deport to Afghanistan, Iran, Syria or the safe countries those people left to come here, is in the billions.
The promise to end hotel use – as the Conservatives were doing – is in tatters, as Labour have opened more, and the Home Office has revealed they’ll still be in use by the next election. It is, on any scale, a huge failure from Yvette Cooper and Labour on small boats, costs, and border security.
We should accept the issue of our not finishing the job. I do and I was part of the efforts to stop it. But if our partial failure, was as they claim “an experiment with open borders” – it wasn’t by the way – then they’ve gone from experimentation to just enacting it for real.
The measures Suella Braverman introduced, and James Cleverly added to in November 2023 are cutting legal migration numbers by tens of thousands and one wonders when that is clear in the statistics if Labour, who opposed it, will try to take credit.
The Conservatives, in opposition have started their policy forums, there’s no doubt they’ll want to build on those ideas they’ve already laid out, as the Shadow Home Secretary did on ConservativeHome:
“We have already said that we would introduce a binding annual migration cap – at a level far, far below those levels recently seen. Parliament would vote on this each year, and the UK would simply stop issuing visas in each category when its cap is hit…We have also announced that we would make sure people who come here to work but who do not make a net economic contribution would never get Indefinite Leave to Remain. Instead, they would be required to leave when their visa expires. It is unfair and immoral that those who have recently arrived and paid no tax or little tax should be a cost to everyone else.”
The elephant still in the room is the ECHR, and that is still a clear bone of contention in the party, but like policy around fixing the economy it seems the public won’t even look at the Conservatives unless the overall offer is a bold and robust platform for genuinely tackling the problem.
Poor or partial delivery is just not an option.
In the meantime it would be good to see more picking apart of the evidence that shows; far from what was promised, and in line with this Government’s overall record, instead of things only getting better, they have grown increasingly worse.
conservativehome.com (Article Sourced Website)
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