The relationship between the UK and France was one of the most conspicuous casualties of the Brexit process. So there will have been big sighs of relief in Downing Street at the evident success of Emmanuel Macron’s state visit to the UK and the summit that followed.
The French president took a full three days out of his schedule to spend in this country – that is a long time by today’s standards. Ceremonial Britain, for its part, pulled out all the stops.
The sun shone, the flags flew – and the undoubted result is an improved diplomatic atmosphere that should help consign some of the adverse Brexit fallout to the past. To the extent that better diplomatic relations improve the prospects for solving, rather than just smoothing over, aggravations, a new chapter has opened.
And the emblem of this – signalled days in advance by the prime minister, but seemingly not tied down until now, is what has been billed the “one-in, one-out” agreement on Channel crossings.
It can be argued that there are more significant issues potentially dividing the UK and France than the “small boats”, which account for a relatively small proportion of new arrivals in the UK.
Those more significant issues would include defence, our respective Atlantic and European allegiances, and nuclear cooperation – this last, in fact, being the subject of a new agreement during Macron’s visit that could prove more important in the longer term than anything else that was decided.
At the popular and domestic political level, however, it is no contest – not for the UK public and not for its government either.
Having pledged to stop the boats, smash the gangs and scale back the use of asylum hotels, this government has presided over a near-50 per cent rise in small boat arrivals. It is one of the most abject and visible failures of its first year in office.
No wonder Sir Keir Starmer seemed so desperate, in the days before the UK-France summit, to secure some sort of agreement, almost any agreement, on the subject with France.
Well, an agreement, of a limited kind, was reached. And the positive aspect is that the UK and France are showing that they can talk to each other on sensitive topics once again, which, in turn, holds out the prospect of cooperation on other things. This is a small step towards the normality that pertained before the UK’s vote to leave the EU.
The agreement as reached, however, and announced as "ground-breaking" by Starmer with undisguised satisfaction at his press conference with Macron, raises many questions both about how it will work in practice and whether it will function as any sort of deterrent at all. First, it is no more than a pilot project – the word “pilot” being rather swallowed in Starmer’s delivery – which makes the commitment seem less than wholehearted.
And where one side is hyper-keen for the arrangement to work, and the other side – France – perhaps rather less so, the fragility of the terms should be clear. Second, in the same vein, there is a major imbalance in political interests here. The UK government needs to show that it is getting a grip on the boats, and that means that the number of arrivals must fall.
But the French interest is a bit different. Ideally, it needs to show that the migrant camps – and the squalor and the violence they spawn – are shrinking. While a source of discontent locally, however, the camps are nothing like as prominent an issue nationally as are the small boats in the UK.
And this means, third, that the boats are fundamentally a UK problem; a problem that stems from the number of people harbouring a “British dream”, and a problem of UK maritime security.
British politicians like to blame the French for inadequate policing on their side of the Channel. But it could be said to be in French interests to have the migrants leave – and anyway, what civilised country sets out to prevent people leaving?
Watching French police slash an inflatable boat in the water last week may have pleased the Starmer government and public opinion, but what if it had been Turkey, or Russia, slashing boats to stop people leaving? It is hard not to see quite a basic ethical, as well as safety, issue here.
One in, one out hardly touches these questions. Fourth, the numbers affected one way or another by this pilot project are small. If even the mooted maximum 50 individuals are returned to France every week, this is a fraction of the thousands currently arriving.
And even if it is one in, one out, with every person returned to France being matched by someone coming the other way, claiming a family tie with the UK, it is hard to see how this will discourage many, still less discredit the “business model” for the boats.
Fifth, on the subject of family ties with the UK. At least some of the current small boat arrivals are related to people already here but who are in no position to sponsor them, whether for lack of legal residency, insufficient means, or the remoteness of the relationship.
And this poses a question. Could this agreement create a new route for family members who would not otherwise qualify to come to the UK, so undercutting rules already in place?
These are longer-term considerations, of course, and it is hard to see the prime purpose of the one in, one out agreement as much more than a public relations exercise to try to persuade the UK public that something is being done.
And while the balance may be in Starmer’s favour today, there could turn out to be a political cost. If the effect of one in, one out is either no change or a change in the wrong direction, this will go down as another misjudged policy decision on the part of the current occupant of No 10. How many more, it will then be asked, can he afford?
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