Senior government figures believe they are on the cusp of achieving a breakthrough with Emmanuel Macron on a deal that would see France take back at least some of those who have crossed the English Channel on small boats.<\/p>\n
In return, the UK would take asylum claimants from France who wish to come to the UK and are believed to have a legitimate reason to do so.<\/p>\n
It’s being called a “one-in-one” out deal, although the numbers will be greater than that.<\/p>\n
But the key word to watch out for, when the deal is announced later, is “deterrent”.<\/p>\n
Sir Keir Starmer has said both he and the French president agree on the need for “a new deterrent to break the business model of the gangs”.<\/p>\n
The big question is the extent to which what is agreed to amounts to that, particularly in the short term.<\/p>\n
Will it put people off getting in a small boat?<\/p>\n
The pilot scheme is expected to involve around 50 migrants a week being returned to France, in return for the UK taking the same number of asylum seekers in France who are deemed to have a legitimate case to move to the UK.<\/p>\n
Critics, including the Conservatives, say this would amount to about 5% of those who are attempting crossing currently, and so would be an inadequate deterrent. <\/p>\n
The Tories point to the deterrent they planned but never got started – the idea of sending migrants to Rwanda. This scheme was scrapped when Labour won the election.<\/p>\n
But it is true to say this agreement, albeit limited in scale initially, marks a new moment in Franco British diplomacy on this issue – the willingness of France to take back some of those who embark on the cross Channel journey.<\/p>\n
The test, in the months and years ahead, can it be scaled up sufficiently to make a noticeable impact on the numbers?<\/p>\n
Or, to put it more bluntly, do the numbers attempting a crossing start to fall, or not? <\/p>\n
Because unless they do, the scheme, on this side of the Channel at least, is likely to be seen as a failure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Senior government figures believe they are on the cusp of achieving a breakthrough with Emmanuel Macron on a…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":53949,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[51,50,52],"class_list":{"0":"post-53948","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-stories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114828635514550083","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53948\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}