As Suella Braverman exchanged pecks on the cheek and signed a £63m deal for new migrant patrols with her French counterpart, Gérald Darmanin, the home secretary looked like a woman who means business.
That was, after all, the point of the exercise. The optics of today’s Anglo-French agreement were designed to calm anti-migrant voters who eye the increase in small boat arrivals with dismay and insist that “Britain is full”. There have been carefully orchestrated sprinklings of rhetoric to go with it. In an article in the Sunday Telegraph, the immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, pledged to end “Hotel Britain”, accusing “economic migrants” of “asylum shopping” in the UK; Rishi Sunak told reporters while on his way to the G20 summit in Indonesia that “the absolute priority that the British people have right now, as do I, is to grip illegal migration”.
Nobody can say government hasn’t already tried to deter refugees from conflict zones coming to the UK. It has spent a fortune on it – £140m that we know about on the Rwanda deal, yet so far not a single asylum seeker has been sent there. Including the new deal, the UK will have paid £175m to the French government to fund anti-migrant operations since 2018.
These expensive initiatives haven’t worked– indeed, the number of small boat Channel crossings is at record levels, with the provisional total so far this year at 41,738 compared with 28,526 last year. Samuel Beckett’s lines from Worstward Ho spring to mind: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Even Braverman has already admitted that the new Anglo-French deal is not a “silver bullet”.
These efforts keep failing because they don’t engage with a key question. Refugees fleeing conflict have to go somewhere. Where should they go? According to the government’s own data, more than 90% of small boat arrivals claim asylum, and record numbers are being granted leave to remain in the UK because they have been found to be genuine refugees. There are no legal routes for these genuine refugees to reach safe havens such as the UK and other countries in Europe, which is why they’re making expensive and terrifying journeys across the Channel in flimsy dinghies.
The government’s line – that people have already passed through safe European countries so should not be travelling on to the UK – is too simplistic. Some spend their entire journey in a lorry until they reach northern France and are pushed on to a dinghy by smugglers. Others are desperate to reunite with family in the UK.
It is a myth that asylum seekers are drawn to the UK in the hope of sleeping between crisp white sheets in a nice hotel bedroom. They are faced with an impossible decision: pay smugglers, often selling everything they own to do so; or stay in a danger zone. The standard of accommodation on arrival in the UK does not feature in their life or death reckonings.
Ministers are so afraid of appearing politically feeble that they refuse to express anything that could be seen as empathy for refugees arriving on small boats, irrespective of the horrors they might have fled. But understanding the suffering that makes people run from their country is an important part of understanding how to solve the problem.
Until government acknowledges the basic truths causing people to take flight, announcements such as today’s are doomed to failure and small boats piled high with desperate humans will continue to arrive. If words are not matched by delivery, big policy reveals about tough new deals will only go so far with voters who buy into Braverman’s inflammatory “invasion” rhetoric.
There are ways forward. They are imperfect but better than what we have at the moment. The refugee crisis is a global one and the response must be global too. Wealthy, peaceful countries need to work together to share responsibility equally and proportionately for supporting refugees fleeing conflict. Charities such as Safe Passage, Care4Calais and the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants are calling for safe and legal routes for asylum seekers which they say could crush the people-smuggling business overnight. Proposals include an expansion of refugee resettlement programmes and special refugee visas. Of course, Brexit has reduced opportunities for the UK to work with Europe on this because we are no longer part of an agreement that allowed some transfers of refugees between different European countries.
The only “success” government can claim in its hardline anti-refugee policies is increasing fear and trauma among refugees. But this is not stopping people from coming, because they feel they do not have the luxury of choice.
I interviewed an Iranian family – mum, dad and teenage daughter – who arrived on a small boat in June 2022 so are in line for forced removal to Rwanda. They appeared calm until I asked if they had received a notice of intent letter about being moved to Rwanda. As suddenly as the flicking on of a light switch, the teenage girl started screaming and crying hysterically because she heard the word Rwanda. Her mother stood up and lifted her daughter’s thick black hair to reveal bald patches underneath. She explained that terror about being sent to Rwanda had caused clumps of this beautiful hair to fall out. They fear they would not be safe there, and that they would be far from Iranian communities which are well established in the UK but nonexistent in Rwanda. They may have heard about the UNHCR’s concerns that asylum seekers forcibly sent to Rwanda could be refouled – forced to return to a country where they are likely to face persecution. The issue of small boat arrivals is indeed complex and challenging, but surely we can do better than this.
Diane Taylor is a journalist who writes for the Guardian. She has a particular interest in human rights, racism and civil liberties
