There was a classic demonstration on BBC Radio’s Today programme this morning of the show’s famed grasp of Reithian objectivity.
Presenter Mishal Husain was utterly incredulous that Nick Timothy, who has come up with proposals to stop the stream of migrant boats coming across the English Channel from France, could possibly be suggesting being so beastly to illegal migrants falsely posing as refugees.
Moving on to interview the Labour party leader, Sir Keir Starmer, she was then utterly incredulous that he could possibly be suggesting not reversing Brexit by returning to the EU’s single market and customs union.
Alert listeners might just have spotted that, in both instances, her incredulous questioning was framed from a left-wing universalist perspective. In the case of Timothy, a former adviser to the Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, he was failing to promote the left-wing universalist position that all asylum-seekers should be treated as bone fide refugees even when they are clearly nothing of the kind (tsk!); and in Starmer’s case, this leader of a left-wing universalist party was failing to be left-wing universalist enough (tsk tsk!!)
So far this year 44,000 people have crossed the Channel in small craft to claim asylum in the UK, up by 64 per cent from last year. The number of migrants arriving on British beaches is overwhelming the system. The backlog of cases now stands at 160,000.
In his paper written with Karl Williams for the Centre for Policy Studies, Timothy is at pains to stress that Britain should show compassion to true refugees. It can’t accept them all, however, and so he suggests their number should be capped at 20,000 per year.
But he demolishes the claim that the vast majority of these boat people are genuine refugees. Most are migrants seeking to game the immigration system. More than 70 per cent are adult males. More than a third are Albanians.
According to the Refugee Convention, a refugee is entitled to claim asylum when directly fleeing a country where his or her life or freedom is in jeopardy. Albania, however, is a safe country. So is France, the country from where these boat people are coming to claim asylum in Britain.
Moreover, virtually all of them have destroyed their identity documents to conceal their origins. Even though destroying identity documents when entering the country is an offence under English law, as too is knowingly entering the country without leave to do so, criminal prosecutions are extremely rare.
To end this abuse of the system — and the criminal trade in people-smuggling that extorts these migrants and forces them onto unseaworthy vessels at risk of being drowned — Timothy and Williams suggest something similar to Australia’s policy. This would include indefinite detention of all asylum-seekers who enter the country illegally; legislation barring such illegal migrants from ever settling in Britain; laws making it impossible to claim asylum in the UK after travelling from a safe country; and other proposals.
Australia, however, was only able to stop its flow of migrants because — although it is party to a number of international human rights treaties — it is not a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and is thus not answerable to the European Court of Human Rights. The UK is. And this is the hard issue that Timothy and Williams don’t duck.
They rightly state that the principal reason for this unstoppable Channel traffic is that the migrants know they will virtually never be sent back. And a major reason for that is that the UK is a signatory to the ECHR. They write:
As we have already seen, legal rights established by the ECHR and its case law repeatedly prevent the removal of illegal immigrants and foreign criminals from Britain… According to Immigration Enforcement’s reports to the NAO [National Audit Office], in 2019 only 48 per cent of enforced returns went ahead as planned, due mainly to legal challenges preventing the other 52 per cent. So there were 7,198 successful enforced returns, but around 7,800 were prevented due to legal challenges, of which a substantial proportion were related to the ECHR. (This excludes the many cases not taken further by officials anticipating ECHR challenges.)
As long as Britain remains a signatory to the Convention and bound by the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, governments will be prevented from adequately enforcing immigration laws.
Leaving the Convention, they acknowledge, would not be straightforward. But in reply to those who object that this would have implications for the Trade and Co-operation Agreement with the EU and — much more important — cause insuperable problems for the Good Friday Agreement which has brought peace to Northern Ireland and which is underpinned by the human rights convention, they say:
One option is to ensure that the ECHR, and the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg court, continues to apply insofar as it relates to the Good Friday Agreement.
A further option, which would help with the Trade and Cooperation Agreement and Good Friday Agreement, is to produce new legislation replacing the ECHR in British law.
This would almost certainly be necessary anyway, given the need to fill the vacuum left by withdrawal from the Convention by providing a clear direction to the courts. This legislation could incorporate all the articles of the ECHR, but make clear that Parliament would be free, when it came to policy, to determine the interpretation of the rights, and the balance between them. British judges would be responsible for interpreting those rights in individual cases.
Another option would be to leave the ECHR and through domestic legislation disapply its provisions only insofar as they relate to immigration removal. This would also limit the ramifications for the Good Friday Agreement and The Trade and Cooperation Agreement with the EU.
In contrast to the honest attempt made by Timothy and Williams to tackle the roots of this issue, Sir Keir Starmer’s position on Brexit is a masterpiece of disingenuousness. Starmer was an ardent Remainer. Now he says there can be no re-opening of the Brexit issue. Yet in the next breath he says he wants to have a new deal with the EU. So how can that not mean re-opening the Brexit issue?
He told the incredulous Mishal Husain that no, he certainly didn’t want to re-open the great controversy and renew the ruinous uncertainty over Brexit — but he did want to obtain a better deal with the EU. No, that didn’t mean he wanted to re-enter the EU’s single market and customs union. It just meant doing a better deal to get rid of “barriers to trade”, producing “much more co-operation” and “building on security arrangements”.
This ignores the fundamental fact that for the EU there’s no such thing as a free déjeuner. Any closer “co-operation” or getting rid of any “barriers” or “building” on anything at all with the bureaucrats of Brussels means giving them a measure of control.
You can bet your bottom dollar that Starmer wants to restart the Great Brexit War, that tore British politics apart after the 2016 EU referendum, like he wants a hole in the head. What he does want to do, it would seem, is pretend to be reconciled to Brexit in order to woo back the thousands of working-class voters who abandoned Labour at the 2019 general election because they understood it wanted to stop the UK from leaving the EU — while Starmer proceeds to undo Brexit by stealth.
His position is all too reminiscent of his disingenuousness during the Great Brexit War, when the Remainer establishment threw everything it could at trying to thwart the will of the British people to free themselves from EU control.
He expressed it on BBC TV’s Question Time — which you can see here at just after 21 minutes in — in March 2017 when the UK was involved in traumatic negotiations with the EU over the terms of its exit deal. Starmer maintained that while he respected the referendum result to leave the EU — but of course!! — he wanted the UK to retain the “exact same benefits” as was afforded by membership of the single market and the customs union. He wanted to
accept we’re leaving, not members but in partnership with the EU so that we can use collaboration and cooperation to meet challenges and to take opportunities.
I happened to be also part of that Question Time panel. And as you can see from the video at around 1 hr 25 minutes in, I described Starmer’s position as a
half-in, half- out attempt by Remainers to pretend to be obeying the will of the British people while in the detail trying to overturn it.
These two great issues, mass uncontrolled immigration and the integrity of the nation-state as expressed in the vote for Brexit, are of course symbiotically linked. The common denominator is the division between “Somewheres” and “Anywheres” — the categories identified by the writer David Goodhart to describe, on the one hand, people rooted in a country and its culture, and, on the other, people who see themselves as citizens of the world.
The latter mindset is perfectly illustrated by the former Cabinet Secretary, Gus O’Donnell, who is quoted in the paper by Timothy and Williams as saying in 2011:
When I was at the Treasury I argued for the most open door possible to immigration... I think it’s my job to maximise global welfare, not national welfare.
So much for love of your country, eh. And that’s what’s all of this is all about.
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