The tragedy of the deaths of at least six people on Saturday morning, as another overcrowded boat sank while trying to reach England’s south coast, has focused attention on the plight of Afghans fleeing their homeland. Rightly so: in the almost two years since the Taliban seized control, it has carried out reprisals against opponents, while the independent legal system has collapsed and poverty and hunger have risen dramatically. Girls and women are living under a regime described by one UN official as “gender apartheid”, and highlighted in this newspaper by Gordon Brown last week.
Last year, Afghan was the second-most common nationality of people arriving in the UK on small boats – although the government deflected attention from this by focusing on Albanians, who constituted the majority of small-boat arrivals. With just 96 Afghans resettled in the UK in 2022, compared with 8,429 who arrived by small boat in the year to March 2023, the government is falling dramatically short of its pledge to resettle 5,000 Afghans.
This is the context for last week’s deeply offensive remark by Lee Anderson, deputy chair of the Conservative party, that if asylum seekers including Afghans and citizens of other war-torn countries object to being housed on the Bibby Stockholm barge, moored off Dorset, they should “fuck off back to France”. Since then it has emerged that the previous day – the same day as the first of 39 people were transferred to the barge – a water sample tested positive for legionella bacteria, which can cause legionnaires’ disease. On Thursday and Friday, they were removed to dry land.
As ministers struggle to explain how an alert raised in Dorset last Monday failed to reach them until three days later, the government’s tactic of treating asylum as an electoral, rather than a policy issue, could hardly be more brazen. Whatever the sequence of last week’s communications, it is extraordinary that the home secretary was not immediately alerted to the risk of a disease outbreak on the barge that is also the flagship of her asylum policy.
Rishi Sunak’s team has rarely looked more cynical than it did last week, when closing ranks around Mr Anderson. The public use of expletives to refer to refugees is a new low for which his party should be ashamed. There is no question that chronic instability in countries including Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Eritrea is a grave problem, and irregular migration is a challenge for politicians around the world. But the UK government’s retreat into populist aggression is dismal, when what is needed is a strong commitment to multilateral solutions, and pragmatic investment to enable the 160,000 claims backlog to be tackled. Instead, Tory strategy appears to be to stagger on until autumn, when the supreme court will rule on the legality of the scheme to deport asylum seekers to a “safe third country” (Rwanda). Then, presumably, Mr Sunak and his colleagues will make what political capital they can out of the issue, while stoking up public anxiety about arrivals and other parties’ discomfort.
There are legitimate differences of opinion about how to deal with small boats. The government has yet to publish impact assessments of its Illegal Migration Act. But with analysis suggesting that the law will result in almost 200,000 people being blocked from claiming asylum, but unable to be deported, with the system costing up to £10bn over three years, the current approach is indefensible.
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