The biggest problem with home secretary Yvette Cooper’s plan to stop the boats is that it sounds unconvincing. One in, one out... how does that help? Especially when it is more like 17 in, one out. What kind of deterrent is that?
But it is the start of a plan to tackle Britain’s migration crisis – Home Office figures indicate that last Wednesday, almost 900 people arrived in boats in one day, bringing the total for 2025 to more than 25,000 – and it’s one that could possibly work. It is, genuinely, the only policy that any government, Labour or Conservative, has devised so far that has a chance of doing so.
The key to it is that the French government has accepted that Britain can send back some of the people crossing the Channel. The deal that has been published today is only a pilot scheme. It does not even say how many people will be returned, although the target is understood to be 50 a week, which is a small fraction of the average 850 arriving each week.
But the point of a pilot scheme is that it allows the mechanics of a return scheme to be tested. It has already passed one test that the naysayers said it would fail: it has been approved by the European Commission.
Now comes the hard part: showing that it is possible to detain and process arrivals, defeat the legal challenges, and then put them on a plane and deliver them to France.
Of those, the legal challenges are likely to be the bottleneck: hence Cooper’s announcement of a fast-track asylum appeals procedure to try to ensure that migrants can be turned round within a few weeks.
If that works, then the aim is to “build”, as Cooper put it on the Today programme this morning. If Britain can send back 50 a week, then there is no reason why we couldn’t return all or nearly all arrivals. The Home Office estimates, and this seems about right, that if it can send back 80 per cent of arrivals, that will have a big deterrent effect, and few crossings will be attempted.
Of course, there are reasons for doubting that this can be achieved.
Will the French allow us to increase the numbers? Will the French even extend the scheme beyond the initial 11 months to which they have signed up? It is bound to take longer than that to start to get the numbers up.
Maybe it will not work, but the point about a pilot scheme is that it allows Cooper the chance to try out, on a small scale, the elements of a scheme that plainly could work. No one else has even proposed a plausible and humane alternative.
That said, the voters’ frustration at the slow pace at which the government is moving is understandable. Labour has been in power for more than a year; the number of crossings is higher than last year; Cooper is only now announcing the plan; and the plan itself looks underwhelming. No wonder Nigel Farage carries all before him.
But let us avoid the trap set by social-media bores of assuming that there are easy or quick solutions that two governments, each desperate to escape the fury of the electorate, have wilfully refused to adopt.
It took time for Keir Starmer to persuade Emmanuel Macron to accept the key that could unlock the solution: that France would take some migrants back. I didn’t think it was possible, because the losses are more obvious than the gains for the French president. Yes, there is the distant prospect of clearing the tent cities in the Pas de Calais, but in the meantime, what is France to do with the migrants who are sent back? I don’t know what Macron got in return, but that was a negotiating triumph on the part of our prime minister.
And it will take more time still to crank the British bureaucracy into action so that it is capable of taking the next, decisive step towards an effective deterrent.
Meanwhile, Farage will score points by pretending the problem is simple and the solution is easy. His “solution” is to destroy our relationship with France by trying to return migrants without French permission; to tear up not just the European Convention on Human Rights but the Refugee Convention and the Convention on the Law of the Sea; and to detain all arrivals indefinitely in huge prison camps at undisclosed locations. And still he wouldn’t be able to deport migrants if other countries will not take them.
If there is a better way, would it not be worth trying that first, even if it might take some time?
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