Braverman courts the party faithful
The home secretary's provocative speech on immigration was a confection of misdirection and scaremongering, a pitch for the leadership after an election loss
Let me start by stating some truths: a country is entitled to control its borders and control who enters; and not every asylum seeker will be recognised as a refugee, though 70 per cent receive refugee status or humanitarian protection—and more than 40 per cent of refusals are overturned on appeal. The numbers arriving in the UK have been greater than those leaving since 1994, and immigration of all kinds is at an historically high level.
We need to be honest and precise when we talk about immigration. We should distinguish between asylum seekers, refugees and economic migrants, legal and illegal. These are not the same things and they do not represent similar numbers. Last year, asylum seekers and refugees were only a fifth of total immigration; in 2019, it was only six per cent.
The speech which the home secretary, Suella Braverman, gave yesterday at the American Enterprise Institute, a venerable right-wing think tank in Washington DC, was extraordinary in its breadth and tenor. It was not really about addressing challenges of the UK’s immigration and asylum system. Rather, it was about framing the whole policy area in very specific terms, framing Braverman within that policy area, and serving her longer-term ambitions.
Braverman addressed two issues in her speech. The first was “uncontrolled and illegal migration”, by implication for economic or other ‘lifestyle’ reasons, while the second was refugees and asylum seekers. She is right to say that these are different cases.
To take asylum first, Braverman argued that the international agreements regulating the treatment of refugees—the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights, which came into force in 1953—are outdated, conceived in a time of smaller populations and less mobility, and therefore are no longer adequate to govern the asylum process. In particular, she highlighted the lax interpretation of two pieces of terminology.
The UN Convention defines refugees as those who have a “well-founded fear of being persecuted” for reasons of race, gender, political views and other factors. The home secretary believes that there has been an “interpretive shift away from “persecution”, in favour of something more akin to a definition of “discrimination””. Furthermore, she argued, the process has gone from requiring a ““well-founded fear” toward a “credible” or “plausible fear””. Braverman delivered the tough-sounding message, without seeming to find it very difficult, that we cannot maintain the status quo if “simply being gay, or a woman, and fearful of discrimination in your country of origin, is sufficient to qualify for protection”.
The first point is deeply misleading. The “interpretation” to which Braverman refers is not carried out by some supranational body or bien pensant Hampstead subscribers to The Guardian. The definition in UK law of terms in the UN Convention are set out in sections 30-35 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, and governed by Immigration Rules written by the Home Office. These state clearly that “persecution” and “well-founded fear” must satisfy the home secretary that an applicant is “a refugee, as defined in Article 1 of the 1951 Refugee Convention”. So Braverman has raised a spectre against which statute already guards.
So who are the people who have been granted protection on the grounds that they fear “discrimination”? Of course she gives no examples. What we do know, however, is that 62 UN member states—just under a third of the total—criminalise homosexuality, and 12 have the option of the death penalty. Women face the danger of female genital mutilation in 30 countries. People fleeing that kind of persecution are covered by legislation. If refugees are being recognised because they fear discrimination, not persecution, the Home Office’s rules are not being properly applied.
Migration is a major challenge, and the numbers are rising. They will continue to rise as countries around the equator become hotter and life becomes less sustainable. She stated that there is an “optimal level of immigration”, but could not define it; however, she warned in very stark terms that if we allow too many people in to the country, it is an “existential challenge”, and greater numbers of immigrants, which have created a multicultural society, are an urgent threat.
The home secretary believes that multiculturalism “has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it”. She continued that it “makes no demands of the incomer to integrate”, and this is a threat to our cohesion, to the glue which holds us together as a nation. Chillingly, for our sense of collective identity, she warned that “what was already there is diluted. Eventually it will disappear.”
This is darkly unspecific, but we can all think of communities she might have had in mind. But it is her very generality which is so corrosive and dangerous. It creates a template and allows each of us to fill in the projections of our worst fears.
What does it mean that “society” will “disappear”? Is it that the population becomes more ethnically, religiously and culturally mixed? That we become more atomised and disconnected? Braverman does not need our fears to be distinct; indeed, they are all the more potent for being shapeless and unknown.
UK Visas and Immigration, part of the Home Office, is failing. There is a backlog of 175,000 asylum applications, and the number is rising. Last year, 46,000 people arrived on small boats; the vast majority of those were asylum seekers; of those, the vast majority were granted protection. If the government focuses on small boats, it is mostly excluding those who are genuine refugees, while four-fifths of immigration consists of economic migrants whom we decide to admit.
Yet the home secretary wants us to think policy is dictated by the too-generous terms of well-meaning but outdated legal agreements, and as a result our society is facing literal extinction.
Yesterday’s speech was about creating a mood. Beyond that, it was about the Conservative leadership. It is obvious that there could be a vacancy soon, if the government is defeated at the general election and Rishi Sunak decides that California is sunnier and more amenable than Richmond. Braverman is, however implausibly, now a clear contender with the nativist right wing of the party membership at her back. She knows how they will have reacted to the headlines of her speech. And they will have had exactly the effect she wanted.