Rishi Sunak started the year with a speech announcing his five priorities. That was quickly followed by Keir Starmer, who sought to outbid him with five missions of his own. The Labour aim was to show more ambition: whereas the Prime Minister just wanted to get the ‘economy growing’, Starmer promised the fastest growth in the G7. This tactic has not had much resonance outside Westminster: a poll for The Spectator found that voters struggled to identify whose pledge was whose. There was, however, one exception: Sunak’s promise to ‘stop small boats’.
Both Sunak and his Home Secretary see the virtue of a migration fight with Labour
It’s one of the few issues on which voters see a real distinction between the two parties and what they would do. Conservative strategists believe that most voters are on their side. Halting illegal Channel crossings is the most important issue for those who are undecided at the next election, meaning Sunak cannot rebuild the 2019 voter coalition without showing progress on the problem.
In a bid to do just this, Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, unveiled new legislation this week that will block anyone who enters the country illegally from claiming asylum, and dared Labour to criticise the morality of the scheme. Sensing a trap, Labour instead criticised the scheme’s practicality.
The problem for Sunak is that Starmer has a point. While most of the Prime Minister’s pledges are easily achievable, it will be much harder to ‘stop the boats’. The Home Secretary has written to MPs saying her legislation has ‘more than a 50 per cent chance’ of being incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). So it may yet be struck down by Strasbourg.
Ministers insist publicly that the bill does not contradict our international obligations but it does at least push at those obligations’ limits. It’s why the legislation took a month longer than planned to finalise, with a push from Braverman to toughen up the bill.
Sunak is more instinctively cautious than his Home Secretary but both see the virtue of a migration fight with Labour. The hope is that the legislation will be a classic wedge issue, unifying Tories behind public opinion while forcing Labour to go against the majority. ‘It’s strong red meat for the Red Wall. It sounds tough and the plan has annoyed all the right people,’ says one senior Tory. ‘The big test is whether it works. It needs to be operational before the election campaign begins.’
Successive Tory governments have pledged to stem illegal immigration, but in the past two years the number of people coming to the UK on small boats has increased fivefold. So far this year, more than 3,000 people have crossed the Channel in small boats – twice as many as had arrived this time last year. ‘It could be a calamity. Sunak will probably end up with more people coming over than even last year,’ says one former Home Office minister.
The plan is certainly ambitious. To some Tories, it is dangerously so. Failing would be symbolic of a wider sense of government incompetence and could doom the party to defeat. Ministers hope a plausible attempt to fix it could give them a chance.
The Rwanda scheme – which is intended to remove asylum seekers from the UK while their applications are dealt with – is already being challenged in the courts. Since the UK won the first case, there has been optimism that the appeal will be unsuccessful and flights will happen sooner than most expect. However, Rwanda has only agreed to take a small number of refugees and the main problem is the slowness of the UK system. Some 96 per cent of those who arrived in 2021 are still awaiting a decision. The build-up has left about 50,000 asylum seekers waiting in hotels and B&Bs at a cost of £7 million a day.
New detention centres are being planned, but the hope is that faster removals will mean a faster turnover. What happens, though, if Rwanda refuses to take more than a few hundred asylum applicants? A government source says that other countries are interested in setting up a similar relationship with the UK but first want to see how well the Rwanda scheme works out.
There are plans, too, for more deals like the fast-track removals agreed with Albania last year (a quarter of all small-boat arrivals last year were Albanians), but the big hope is for a deal with Emmanuel Macron. France says it intercepts about half of all small boats that leave its shores. The Home Office believes that if this figure rose to 75 per cent, it would break the business model of the people traffickers, who would be un-able to justify their thousands of pounds in fees for a one-in-four success rate.
Despite the doubts about the plan, Sunak surprised many of his MPs with the Northern Ireland Protocol deal, so may surprise them again. Ministers argue that a government with grip can achieve where previous governments failed. But MPs are impatient. Members of the Red Wall intake and Tory Brexiteers have publicly called for the UK to withdraw from the ECHR so as to ‘take back control’ of the asylum laws. A handful of backbenchers are on ‘Reform watch’ by the whips, who fear they may defect to Richard Tice’s party just as some did to Ukip in 2014. Nigel Farage has said that only pulling out of the ECHR can fix the issue.
Sunak has not ruled it out. Both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss saw some benefit in a ‘stop the boats’ election. Some strategists think of it as a potential ‘Get Brexit done: take-two’ campaign. But it could cause more trouble for the Conservative party than it’s worth. Pulling out of the ECHR would mean a rewriting of the Good Friday Agreement and the Brexit agreement, not to mention risking major ructions in Westminster.
When Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab refused to rule out leaving the ECHR last month, Victoria Prentis, the attorney-general, was quick to stress that this was not a necessary condition for dealing with migration. Her comments were read as a rebuff to Raab. She is one of a number of ministers understood to be anxious about even threatening to pull out of the ECHR. ‘I can’t see the cabinet remaining intact if he backed it,’ says a former cabinet minister.
Hence Sunak’s dilemma: the 2019 Tory majority was won on the wedge issue of Brexit; does the small boats theme have the same potential? And at what cost to party unity? It’s a dangerous tool to use. But if the latest plan fails, pulling out of the ECHR may end up being the only option he has left.
Why small boats are a big election issue
5
1
09.03.2023
Rishi Sunak started the year with a speech announcing his five priorities. That was quickly followed by Keir Starmer, who sought to outbid him with five missions of his own. The Labour aim was to show more ambition: whereas the Prime Minister just wanted to get the ‘economy growing’, Starmer promised the fastest growth in the G7. This tactic has not had much resonance outside Westminster: a poll for The Spectator found that voters struggled to identify whose pledge was whose. There was, however, one exception: Sunak’s promise to ‘stop small boats’.
Both Sunak and his Home Secretary see the virtue of a migration fight with Labour
It’s one of the few issues on which voters see a real distinction between the two parties and what they would do. Conservative strategists believe that most voters are on their side. Halting illegal Channel crossings is the most important issue for those who are undecided at the next election, meaning Sunak cannot rebuild the 2019 voter coalition without showing progress on the problem.
In a bid to do just this, Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, unveiled new legislation this week that will block anyone who enters the country illegally from claiming asylum, and dared Labour to criticise the morality of the scheme. Sensing a trap, Labour instead criticised the scheme’s practicality.
The problem for Sunak is that Starmer has a point. While most of the Prime Minister’s pledges are easily achievable, it will be much harder to ‘stop the boats’. The Home Secretary has written to MPs saying her legislation has ‘more than a 50 per cent chance’ of being........
© The Spectator
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Mort Laitner
Andrew Mitrovica
Gideon Levy
Grant Arthur Gochin
Priyamvada Gopal
Poonam Muttreja
Zaher Sahloul
Patrick Gathara
Obaid Mir
