If you had hired as many different builders in the past five years as Britain has hired home secretaries, you would assume your house was deeply flawed. Yet the latest, Suella Braverman, one of four in that time, has managed 10 months under Rishi Sunak and is reportedly under pressure to be sacked. It is hard to imagine how a senior minister in a controversial department can operate when those around her think she is about to go. To put it mildly, the job should be held by someone with the authority to act. The habit of Boris Johnson and now Sunak of using cabinet jobs not as a reward for competence but in return for loyalty has been disastrous. The Home Office is not alone. In the past four years Britain has had six education secretaries and three transport secretaries. No wonder the British government is a mess.
Sunak’s appointing of a hard rightwinger to the high-profile position of home secretary, just a few days after she had been forced to resign from the same post, might have been politically wise had there been a plausible policy in place. On the leading electoral issue of immigration there was not. Whoever dreamed up this month’s headline-grabbing event of “small boats week”, as if it were a yachting festival, should be fired. Tasteless in itself, it became a farce: a diseased prison barge, attacks on migrants’ lawyers, six drowned migrants and a record 756 asylum seekers crossing the Channel in a single day. Meanwhile Braverman daily commits herself to unattainable targets and makes absurd accusations that immigration is all Labour’s fault.
As the veteran Labour home secretary Jack Straw regularly points out, there is nothing new in high immigration into Britain, though asylum-seeker applications remain modest when adjusted for population and put into European context.
What is new is the incapacity of the Home Office to process it. A procedure that should take a matter of hours and, in most cases, result in swift admission to Britain’s needy labour force, now constitutes an unprecedented 173,000 potential refugees under house arrest and awaiting a decision. This is more than double the number of ordinary UK prisoners. The policy beggars belief, given that they are able-bodied workers of whom Britain’s public and private sectors are chronically in need.
The reason for this number is not a surge in Albanian or Kurdish gangsterism. It is not French incompetence at Calais or over-charitable lifeboats or a shortage of detention centres or an excess of dodgy lawyers. The answer was never going to be more detention ships or decanting people to Rwanda, Ascension Island or Turkey. One answer may be for the west to stop invading and destabilising countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq. But a more immediate one lies in the Home Office’s clearly hopeless, indeed collapsed, bureaucracy.
This department of state must be unfit for purpose. Its inadequacy is sorely undermining Sunak’s bid to rescue his government from electoral humiliation. The belief that immigration could somehow be turned into a weekly headline-grabbing triumph was naive beyond belief. The issue is so emotional and electorally sensitive it has always called for de-escalation, international cooperation and as much bipartisanship as possible. All else is a gift to rightwing extremism.
Either way, this is not Sunak’s finest hour. He has appointed a dud minister with a dud policy to a dud department. He should first tackle the dud department.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
