Kemi Badenoch might say that she was “only asking a question” when she said, at a meeting with protesters against an asylum hotel in Epping: “Is it possible for us to set up camps and police that, rather than bringing all of this hassle into communities?” But it wouldn’t be a good idea.
While the answer is yes – it is technically possible to build tent villages away from population centres to house those applying for refugee status – these camps would always be close to somewhere.
Badenoch’s question is an example of the politics of “far away” that has always afflicted thinking about asylum seekers. Even Tony Blair considered a detention camp on the island of Mull, which seems empty and far away from London – but people live there, too, and in the end he decided that he was also only asking a question.
He also thought about using the Falklands for an asylum processing centre, and the last Conservative government went through Ascension Island and St Helena before finally devising a scheme that was the ultimate “far away”, to deport arrivals to Rwanda without even considering their applications for asylum.
And Rwanda only ever had the capacity to take a few hundred migrants, which would have been insignificant against the 50,000 that have arrived by small boat in little more than a year of the Labour government.
While the cross-Channel traffic is high, putting asylum-seekers “somewhere else” does not solve the problem. Nor would processing asylum claims more quickly – although that would end the need for hotels, because migrants accepted as refugees or granted leave to remain would be allowed to work and would be able to support themselves.
But that would not solve the problem of the small boats continuing to arrive, which is what is so damaging to people’s confidence that the government is in control of immigration. That is the problem that Badenoch ought to be addressing, instead of talking vaguely of “camps”.
Indeed, what is notable about the reporting of the psychologically significant 50,000-mark being passed is how little the condemnation of the Labour government for “losing control of our borders” is matched by practical suggestions for regaining control of them.
This is not surprising in Badenoch’s case, because it was the previous government that lost control of the sea border in the first place – as Jacqui Smith, who was Labour’s minister for the media round this morning, fairly pointed out.
The Conservative case against Labour rests on two flimsy arguments. One is that Labour cancelled the Rwanda scheme, which was “just about to work”. The other is that Badenoch is edging towards repudiating the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
Neither is convincing. The Rwanda scheme was just about to work in the sense that I am just about to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was always too small to deter cross-Channel arrivals: if they are willing to risk their lives to get here, they would be willing to take the tiny risk of removal to Rwanda. And ditching the ECHR would not make much difference to the numbers of failed asylum seekers who could be removed from the UK.
What is more important for Keir Starmer, however, is the threat from Nigel Farage. His “solution” to the small boats problem is no more credible than the Tories’, but it is not undermined by having recently been in government and unable to do anything about it.
Farage’s policy is to detain and deport all illegal migrants – although his manifesto last year did not say where, how or even if the countries to which they should be sent would take them.
In practice, he proposes indefinite detention in prison camps, location unknown. Meanwhile, Reform’s policy is that “migrants in small boats will be picked up and taken back to France”. What if the French retaliate by taking them off the quay and taking them to the UK? Farage has no answer.
But he doesn’t need one, because he hasn’t failed – yet. That is why it is so important to Starmer that his plan to return migrants to France – by agreement – succeeds.
The education minister was right this morning to say the Labour government had inherited a problem from the Tories that was not “our fault”, and she was honest enough to admit that it is a problem that, “up to this point, we haven’t managed to tackle in terms of the numbers who are coming here”.
The Labour government has a possible solution. If it can increase the numbers on the “one in, one out” scheme so that all or nearly all arrivals are sent back to France, the small boats will stop coming.
But it will take time. And time and patience are running out.
