Well, that didn’t take long, did it? One of the small boat arrivals returned to France under the much-trumpeted one-in, one-out agreement has made his way back to the UK – in another small boat. You don’t have to be a budding Reform voter to join the chorus of “You couldn’t make it up”.
Now what?
The only way for the agreement to retain even a sliver of credibility is for the individual concerned to be packed off back to France. No court appeals on the spurious grounds of modern slavery or anything else. Minister Josh MacAlister insisted this morning that the government will keep sending migrants back to France "again and again", under the returns deal.
Even with such decisive action, the arrangement has been shown to have a fatal flaw: a resourceful, or desperate, asylum-seeker has simply made it irrelevant. “One in, out out” has become the hokey-cokey. Even as a pilot scheme – one that former home secretary Yvette Cooper had hoped to scale up – it has been shown to be largely without practical merit.
In the week that the total number of migrants crossing the Channel so far this year surpassed the tally for the entirety of 2024, it can only accelerate the government’s search for other solutions. Certainly, killing it off would give new broom Shabana Mahmood the latitude to, at worst, rearrange some deckchairs – and, at best, to go again, and harder this time, like the government means it. The leaking of an internal departmental report in which she described the Home Office “not yet fit for purpose” at least points to the latter.
So now what? Moving asylum-seekers out of hotels into disused military bases or temporary camps has to be a matter of urgency. Other European countries do this without apparently violating any law; why can’t the UK?
The government might also consider the use of detention. There is surely an argument for detaining those whose identity and record have not been checked, as an elementary measure of national security. That could be the grounds for emergency legislation, which would give the UK at least a head start on any lawyers’ appeals to the ECHR.
Also coming back into fashion, and not only in the UK, is the concept of so-called asylum hubs, of which the Conservatives’ notorious Rwanda project was an early example. Such third-country asylum hubs are designed to address the problem of deporting those whose return to their home country is, for whatever reason, impossible.
Rwanda was a hard sell, both because of the country’s recent past, and because it would have taken only a very small number of migrants. While it would be politically embarrassing for Labour to revive a Conservative policy that it killed off the moment it took office, it might choose to sidestep that by billing it as akin to Denmark’s putative arrangement with Rwanda. In 2022, prime minister Mette Frederiksen’s centrist administration, which was long pursued a “zero refugee” policy since coming to power, signed an agreement on the possible transfer of thousands of asylum seekers to the East African country.
The UK is now reported to be talking to Kosovo, at the same time as sending military personnel to the wider region to advise on stemming irregular migration. Given the issues of its own that Kosovo has, and the fact that it is not universally recognised as an independent country, this might not be a particularly wise choice as an asylum hub – though, to be honest, few countries are.
Might it not be preferable in fact for the UK to handle its own arrangements for accommodating and deporting those who do not qualify for asylum? The UK is no longer part of the EU, so not party to the Dublin Regulation that was supposed to distribute asylum responsibility around the EU. The UK has overseas territories and dependencies that are, strictly speaking, not the UK, which could perhaps be persuaded to help out here – in return for a continued blind eye turned to certain aspects of, say, questionable money…?
Being accommodated here would not confer any right to gain asylum or residence in the UK – so meeting the only conditions that have actually proved effective in stemming irregular migration (short of Berlin Wall-style force). This is how Australia stopped its small boats problem, and is the solution recently broached by one-time migration liberal, Tony Blair. The point is that a hub solution suggests that some, perhaps many, will be allowed to stay – and so long as even a tenuous hope persists, the boats will keep coming.
In waiting so long to get serious about the small boats, the UK has been almost uniquely supine. This is a matter of national security, or it should be. That’s the whole point of having defined borders and a visa system. The UK has a shrinking military force that it deploys everywhere, from the South China Sea (to protect sea-lanes), the Black Sea and the Baltic (to help Ukraine), and now those advisers in the Western Balkans and a new peace-monitoring mission in Gaza… but not the Channel. Apocryphally, the UK military is reluctant to become involved. No government has pressed the case – leaving it to Donald Trump to make the case for ministers.
But perhaps, with the proven failure of “one-in, one-out”, the time has come – and I say this with reluctance – to now take on France.
If all those arriving in small boats were arriving instead at a UK airport, they would be returned on the next flight to their place of departure. Arguing that France should prevent the boats leaving was always a futile endeavour – not only because it was in France’s interests that the irregular migrants should leave, but because France, as a free country, has no bar on people leaving; nor should it.
It is for the UK to protect its own borders. There may be good reasons why the UK’s top brass is averse to acting in the Channel, if it is (which in theory could include military clashes with France). But how sensible is it that a major UK maritime border is effectively being secured by the RNLI, whose priority is not border security, but rescuing those in danger on the sea.
Relations with France could become very ugly if the UK were to move to enforce its Channel border. But now might not be the worst time to press the issue by turning some of the boats back or detaining their passengers, pending their removal to... France.
France barely has a functioning government at present. At best, it could choose, rather than open conflict with the UK, reinforcing its own land border controls, much as Germany and Poland have done, the terms of the borderless Schengen zone notwithstanding. There could then be fewer congregating around Calais.
Any stand-off with France has to be the last option. In the end, though, it could be the only one that works.
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