The UK’s immigration impotence

We will never know precisely who Channel migrant number 100,000 was, but we do know he was one of around 700 arrivals brought into Dover on Thursday.

And we can be fairly confident that number 100,000 was indeed a ‘he’, as 85 per cent of the small boat migrants are male compared, for instance, to our authorised Ukrainian refugee scheme in which women have outnumbered men by a ratio of two to one.

The British state first acknowledged this illicit traffic to be a crisis on 29 December, 2018, when the then home secretary Sajid Javid cut short a family holiday to deal with the arrival of around 200 people by small boat that month.

By summer 2019, the new PM Boris Johnson felt the issue was sufficiently serious to record a piece to camera designed to create a deterrent effect, in which he pledged to prospective arrivals: ‘We will send you back.’

It is a measure of how the crisis has escalated to note that Johnson was at the time addressing himself to just the second cohort of 1,000 Channel migrants who were then preparing to set out for Blighty. In the ensuing four years we have seen the arrival of 98 further cohorts of 1,000 amid countless ministerial initiatives that were supposed to ‘break the business model of the people traffickers’. And aside from several hundred Albanians, very few have been sent back anywhere.

The official figures tell a grim story of government impotence. In 2018, there were 299 arrivals, in 2019 there were 1,843, in 2020 there were 8,466, in 2021 there were 28,526, and in 2022 there were 45,755. That left headroom of just 15,111 before the landing yesterday of Mr One-hundred-thousand.

With peak season for the Channel boats now getting underway, there is little reason to think that 2023’s final figure will be materially different from 2022’s. Rishi Sunak told us in January that he would do whatever was necessary to stop the boats. Whatever that thing might be, he hasn’t done it yet.

Some 50,000 migrants are currently being accommodated at vast taxpayer expense in hotel rooms, while just a couple of dozen were living on the headline-grabbing Bibby Stockholm barge in Dorset, until they were all farcically evacuated this afternoon.

The past week has been full of gimmickry from ministers apparently under instruction to hype the issue of illegal immigration to discomfort the Labour party. Having Conservative deputy chairman Lee Anderson publicly tell the migrants to ‘f*** off back to France’ would be laughable were it not for the fact that his outburst seems no less likely to succeed than any other step that has been floated.

Today the idea of ‘pushbacks’ mid-Channel, first aired when Priti Patel was home secretary, is being mooted again. As ministers must know, there is zero chance of this ever happening to overburdened inflatables in the middle of the world’s busiest shipping lane.

In the absence of an offshore detention capacity or a firm intention to disapply the European human rights framework and the ludicrously outdated 1951 UN Refugee Convention, something close to a de facto right for foreign nationals to enter Britain illegally and live here permanently has arisen.

The corrosive impact on the social contract and public trust in the political process is now very marked, with Conservative-leaning voters far more exercised by the scandal than Labour-leaning ones. Ministers find themselves running the British public realm rather in the manner of rock festival organisers putting tickets on sale at the same time as declaring that gatecrashers will be welcomed in for nothing. Music fans would surely eschew such a deal, but UK taxpayers do not have the luxury of making a similar choice.

Establishment voices are right to say that the drastic step of withdrawing from the European Convention of Human Rights and therefore from the jurisdiction of its Strasbourg-based supervisory court would create several political headaches for the UK, including over the Good Friday Agreement and the terms of our Brexit deal with the EU.

But politics is all about priorities. No headache will be bigger than the issue of how to stop the Channel boats by the time the 200,000th arrival steps ashore at Dover. On current trends that will happen some time during the autumn of 2025.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/the-uks-immigration-impotence/

***********************************

My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
    
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
 
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

*******************************