Nigel Farage’s plan for the mass deportation of asylum seekers is still unrealistic. His advisers have given it more thought than the previous plan, which was to pick up people on small boats and take them back to France.
That has been quietly dropped, now that Reform has thought through the implications of entering French waters and invading France. What, for example, would stop French boats from taking migrants from the quayside in France and returning them to Britain without our permission?
Farage’s plan now is to repudiate several treaties in order to detain everyone arriving on a small boat and to send them Somewhere Else. That “Somewhere Else” is better defined than it was before, but the plan is still pretty unconvincing.
“Somewhere Else” includes countries such as Afghanistan and Eritrea. If people are tortured or killed when they are sent there, that will be too bad. “I’m really sorry, but we can’t be responsible for everything that happens in the whole of the world,” he says in his interview with The Times today.
Farage’s plan doesn’t even seem to convince him, because he has not one but two back-up plans, presumably in case public servants refuse to carry out instructions that may be unlawful in common law. He is “open to” reviving the Rwanda scheme, and also suggests Ascension Island as a place to imprison migrants who cannot be sent anywhere else.
Ascension Island, the UK overseas territory in the South Atlantic, used to feature in the “fantasy island” maunderings of Priti Patel, when she was home secretary. Nothing came of it because “it’s a long, long way and it would be expensive”, as Farage says, before giving the game away: “But again, it’s symbolism.”
He is right. It is symbolism, but it is effective. Attempts to point out the practical drawbacks of Farage’s policy are beside the point. The failures of existing asylum policy are so shocking, and the government seems to be so powerless to fix them, that almost any alternative policy seems worth a try.
As the summer has lengthened, it is clearer than ever that Keir Starmer’s government is in serious trouble. For a while after the election, the story was that poor decisions and a difficult inheritance led to early unpopularity, as if this might be a temporary thing. And it may still be that three years of unexpected and strong economic growth would transform the situation. But otherwise, the perception that the government – of both main parties – has lost control over who can come into the country seems fundamental. The default assumption has to be that, unless Starmer can stop the boats, Farage will be prime minister.
The problem of asylum hotels would be manageable if there were not hundreds more uninvited asylum seekers arriving each week. In fact, most of the government’s problems would be manageable if the boats were stopped. Because then the question at the next election would be whether voters thought Reform or Labour would be better at managing the economy and the NHS. Those are questions on which Labour wins. If the question is “who will stop the boats?” Reform will win.
Which makes me wonder at the absence of urgency in the government. Starmer watched as Rishi Sunak, having promised to stop the boats, failed to do so and was punished at the ballot box. Yet he risks the same thing happening to him.
He has, it is true, made unexpected progress in negotiating a returns deal with Emmanuel Macron, the French president. I am almost alone among commentators in giving Starmer credit for it, and in arguing that it might even work. But the odds are against it.
The first batch of detainees has to clear several legal hurdles before they can be sent back to France. Each deportation will be challenged individually in cases that may last for months. If any deportees finally arrive in France, Macron will have to remain signed up to the deal while the numbers are increased to the point at which migrants decide that it is not worth trying to cross the Channel.
It is no use gambling the survival of the Labour government on the vagaries of judges and the whims of the French president. Starmer and Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, have worked diligently within the constraints of normal politics. They have secured the deal with France and increased the number of failed asylum seekers who have been returned, but only from the pathetically low level reached by the Conservative government.
But they have been treating the small boats issue as if it is just an ordinary problem, instead of an emergency that threatens to make Farage prime minister. Starmer needs to throw everything at this problem. He needs to have been throwing everything at it since last year. He needs to do things that may once have seemed outlandish, including some of the things that Farage is suggesting.
Not everything in Farage’s plan is impossible. Germany is sending Afghans who have broken the law back to Afghanistan, for example, in a deal brokered by Qatar. Greece has “suspended” asylum applications. Denmark’s social democratic government has legislated for a Rwanda-style policy.
The only thing that will defeat Farage’s unworkable asylum policy is a workable one. Starmer and Cooper have to find one, and quickly.
