In the rock-paper-scissors of British state dysfunction, a new hierarchy has been revealed: nimbyism beats asylum law. The government is not allowed to turn hotels into asylum centres without planning permission from local councils, the High Court has ruled in the Epping case. Ah, but don’t yet count out the government lawyers. We may still find, if they win on appeal, that central government convenience beats nimbyism.
That leaves the last fistfight of the circle — asylum law versus central government diktat — but the Supreme Court’s Rwanda ruling already established the answer: asylum law wins. Around and around it goes, in that familiar, futile exercise that passes for governance in liberal democracies nowadays.
So you can scoff at Nigel Farage and his extravagant promise to find a time machine and deport 580,000 illegal immigrants before they were born, or whatever, but I for one hope you choke on your scoffs. I’ve had enough of the scoffers. It’s all they ever do: someone proposes a solution to a problem and before they’ve even finished speaking you can hear the professional scoffsmen and women clearing their throats, ready to cover us all in hopeless, scoffing scorn.
They know the rules of this intricate rock-paper-scissors game better than you and they are here to tell you that there’s a piece of paper that will beat that rock you’ve just lobbed into the debate, that’s going to wrap it up in paperwork before it even lands — before it launches! Just you wait. Then we can all go back to doing nothing about urgent problems like any other respectable first world country.
What the scoffers can’t see, or refuse to notice, is the ultimate result of their victory. Eventually, the unaddressed problem gets worse and worse until even they can’t deny it, until 30,000 hotel beds are filled up with asylum seekers, and they themselves end up making proposals even more outlandish than ideas they once scoffed at. Take, for example, the Rwanda deportation scheme. Keir Starmer called it a “gimmick” that was “immoral” and “dead and buried before it started”. But what did his spokesman say when asked about whether or not his government would, as Farage suggests, sign deals with regimes like the Taliban to deport Afghans? “We’re not going to take anything off the table.” Bloody hell.
It’s not just Britain. Germany has deported dozens of Afghans into the clutches of the Taliban, human rights be damned, on the grounds that they were convicted of crimes. And Berlin’s right-left coalition has brought in all sorts of measures originally proposed by the AfD, which everyone of supposedly decent political stripe denounced as fascist, to ramp up deportations and reduce family reunification rights. Likewise, a few years ago, the EU declared the Rwanda scheme incompatible with international law. Yet in May, Brussels formally proposed that governments be permitted to deport asylum seekers if they can find a “safe third country” to send them to, which sounds awfully Rwanda-ish to me.
In fact, the Supreme Court’s problem with the Rwanda scheme was never the principle of it. It was shot down not because the judges thought we had a duty to provide refuge in Britain but because they decided (on rather flimsy evidence, as it happens, but perhaps still correctly) that Rwanda was too inept to be trusted with asylum decisions.
If Starmer had really wanted to solve the small boats problem, the fastest way would have been to spend his first year finding another country or jurisdiction not called Rwanda to slot into the legislation the Tories had passed. But this would come perilously close to eating his own scoff, so he chose instead to engage in pointless rhetoric about smashing gangs, “one-in-one-out” and shake it all about.
All of which has brought him to this: having his spokesman claim sternly that he might, in the right circumstances, shake hands with Voldemort himself if it meant getting Farage off his back for another day or two. On the current trajectory, Farage will soon propose blasting migrants into space — “a long overdue boost for our fantastic British space industry” — upon which Mr Human Rights will expostulate that of course we don’t need to send people into orbit when Earth has at least a thousand perfectly good atolls still bereft of human inhabitants.
Rockets aside, a lot of Farage’s plan, much of which was already in the Rwanda scheme, will eventually come to pass, because voters will become so overwhelmingly enraged by the status quo. At some point, those coming to Britain illegally in boats will be put in detention centres and deported, rather than put up in Ye Olde Unicorn Inn and given ice lollies while skinheads scream at them through the windows. And if migrants actually believe this will happen, many will opt instead, as Farage proposes, to leave voluntarily in return for a taxpayer-funded bribe, which is a good deal cheaper than paying millions to hotels, landlords, lawyers and outsourcing companies. Those already in the UK illegally, perhaps overstaying their visas to work under the radar, will face a growing prospect of kick-down-the-door immigration raids.
The reason this will happen is because other countries have done it and found it worked. Australia, the US, Sweden and Denmark have all dramatically reduced illegal immigration using these sorts of measures. Even Italy has cut landings on its vast Mediterranean coast. And in 2022, the UK signed a returns agreement with Albania that resulted in a 90 per cent drop in Albanian boat arrivals after the deportation of just 6,000 people.
The Rwanda scheme, in short, would have worked if it had been given the chance, because the evidence suggests that you don’t need to deport that many to change the calculation for people engaged in the risky business of hiring a smuggler. A definitive and well-trailed shift in the legal environment can be enough to signal that a particular country is not worth trying.
You will notice that all of the countries I’ve cited are still members of various conventions on refugees and on torture (though the US is involved in legal battles on that front) and all the European ones are still members of the ECHR. So ditching these agreements should in theory not be necessary. Farage almost admitted as much, when he said that the reason to leave or suspend international treaties governing migration was to “remove the tools from our own judiciary”, rather than because all of these bodies were definitively beyond change. (He expressed the hope that the refugee and torture conventions might eventually be reformed in light of modern migration volumes.)
There is something there. When Britain’s lawyers and civil servants and planning officers engage in administrative fistfights, there’s a sense in which the right to cohesion in a regional town or commuter belt, with its naive schoolgirls in miniskirts and its three-star hotel earmarked for hundreds of single men from Eritrea or Afghanistan, hardly gets a look-in. Epping might have won this round but the legal runaround is still going. They said no to Rwanda, they’ll say no to Farage’s version, but at some point, they’re going to have to say yes to something. It’s just a question of how many of their own words they have to scoff.