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.
