Stop the boats! What do harsh measures mean for our politics?
The government is attempting a crackdown in migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats, but will its hard-nosed approach be effective?
Yesterday’s excitement at Westminster was all about small boats, for the first time since the retreat from Dunkirk in 1940. The home secretary, Suella Braverman KC, made a statement to the House of Commons in which she announced that the government was bringing in legislation in the form of the Illegal Migration Bill which would require her to remove would-be immigrants arriving in the UK on small boats to Rwanda or another (safe) third country. Having used Braverman as his vanguard, the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, then held a press conference later in the afternoon at Downing Street in which he set the context for the proposed legislation: this was a major step towards his objective to “take back control of our borders, once and for all”.
I don’t propose to pick apart the policy proposals of the bill here. I do want to look at why this legislation in being introduced now, what challenges it might face and how it might affect the fortunes of the government.
Recently I penned an article in which I highlighted three activities which I felt the Conservative Party had to cease, as they were unhelpful towards the medium-term goal of winning the next election. My third point was that the party must avoid retreating to its base and developing sharply right-wing policies for the purposes of differentiation from the Labour Party, not least because it is no longer how large, or of what nature, the electoral base now is. I think there is little disagreement that the current focus on immigration is a policy of red meat to reassure the true believers, which prima facie would seem to contradict my advice; but then I am not expecting anyone in Downing Street to be waiting patiently for every word to fall from my pen.
It is also an obvious truth that a policy can be a sop to one’s party faithful but also a constructive and helpful approach to a challenge to public policy. Sunak and Braverman are trying to create a narrative which includes the arrival of immigrants on the South Coast of England in small boats as an almost existential threat to the UK, with citizens looking on in horror. It is certainly true that controlling this aspect of migration is an area in which voters have concerns about the prime minister: in January, an opinion poll conducted by People Polling for GB News (note that caveat) found that those surveyed had little confidence in Sunak to handle the problem. It reported that 57 per cent were “not confident at all” that the prime minister would control the numbers of migrant arriving, while only four per cent were “completely” or “fairly” confident. In that respect, then, this was a policy area which desperately needed attention.
It is certainly true that there has been increased media focus on the issue of small boats crossing the English Channel, and this has had its own effect. Polling conducted throughout 2022 for UK in a Changing Europe showed that the public believed immigration to have risen since Brexit, and that nearly half of voters thought “illegal immigration” had climbed in particular. But commenting on that survey, Sir John Curtice, doyen of pollsters and professor of practice at the University of Strathclyde, points to a strange quirk: while immigration was undoubtedly a very important factor in the 2016 referendum on Brexit, those who had voted to leave, and who thought immigration had continued to rise, were not showing any signs of regretting or wishing to reverse their vote. In other words, immigration seems to have become less important.
There is an argument that the landscape is changing on immigration. Last month, a survey by the Policy Institute at King’s College London plus the United Kingdom near the top of 24 nations in terms of acceptance of economic migration. Only 29 per cent of people in the UK in 2022 said priority over jobs should go to local people, compared with 65 per cent when the same question was asked in 2009, placing us third behind only Germany and Sweden; while we were fourth of the 24 in terms of the belief that immigrants have a very or quite good impact on the development of the country. There are, of course, many kinds of migration, and those openly seeking work in the UK may be regarded very differently from those arriving at least professing refugee status in small boats on the South Coast. But one is permitted to wonder whether the government had chosen an issue which is of burning importance to a large section of the electorate.
There is an issue of legality. When bills are presented in the House of Commons, they traditionally have on their front page a statement of compatibility with human rights law and particularly the European Convention on Human Rights, made in the name of the minister in charge. The Illegal Migration Bill is different. It carries a rubric I have never seen before (and for a year in the 2000s I was in charge of bills being published, so I’m familiar with the format), which reads as follows in the name of Suella Braverman:
I am unable to make a statement that, in my view, the provisions of the Illegal Migration Bill are compatible with the Convention rights, but the Government nevertheless wishes the House to proceed with the Bill.
This seems to me an extraordinary admission, drawing attention to what one would usually think of as a drafting issue in the bill: what if it does fall foul of our obligations under the ECHR, of which the UK was one of the original signatories in 1950? (Indeed, the drafting was led by the chairman of the Council of Europe Consultative Assembly’s Committee on Legal and Administrative Questions, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe KC, who had been attorney general in Churchill’s caretaker ministry in 1945 and would become home secretary in 1951.)
The government has been projecting mixed messages on the compatibility of the Illegal Migration Bill with the ECHR. A spokesman for the prime minister declared that “we believe we can bring in tough new legislation that remains within ECHR”, but at the same time a letter to Members of Parliament from the home secretary has noted that the proposals in the bill are “robust and novel”. This leads her to believe, with, a cynic might imagine, a degree of barely concealed glee:
This does not mean that the provisions in the Bill are incompatible with the convention rights, only that there is a more than 50% chance that they may not be… We are testing the limits but remain confident that this Bill is compatible with international law.
The idea of withdrawing from the ECHR has been in the air for some time. The right of the Conservative Party tends towards a belief that the ECHR is a vehicle for activist European judges to interfere in the judicial affairs of independent countries, and has too often “frustrated” the plans of the UK government, for example to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. In the past weeks and months, the notion of withdrawal has been pressed with particular enthusiasm by Simon Clarke, the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland, and briefly a cabinet minister under Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. As it happens, Clarke was born in the same hospital as me, North Tees, though I arrived some years before him. He is the second-tallest MP, at 6’7” (his school nickname was “Stilts”), and he suffers from agoraphobia (I assume the two are not related); he has been notable for his sometimes overwrought devotion to Johnson, of whom he said “He has won every major election he has fought because he is a politician with the capacity both to inspire and to deliver”.
Clarke is now more than happy to entertain the idea of life outside the Convention. He has argued that the ability to introduce effective controls on immigration outweighs the symbolism of remaining a signatory of the ECHR, and that the 73-year-old convention may now be showing signs of age.
We hear a great deal about how the UK played a key role in drawing up the convention, but the issues now being litigated under the ECHR were not in contemplation post-World War II. Our human rights architecture is being abused by criminals to endanger the lives of desperate people.
He also rejects the idea that the UK’s withdrawal for the ECHR would be a repetitional blow for us or our European allies, let alone give succour to our enemies.
We also hear a lot about how leaving the ECHR would embolden our adversaries. With respect, I don’t believe Putin will be influenced in his madness by whether or not we subscribe to the convention. Plus our actions to defend freedom are the ultimate measure of our values.
This is a point of view. One must certainly always keep under review the relevance and fitness of agreements into which we entered many decades ago, as times can change very significantly. The ECHR was born out of the aftermath of the Second World War, and against a backdrop of Soviet-backed oppression of much of Eastern Europe, and was as much a matter of symbolism as of effective and enforceable policy. Certainly, the European Court of Human Rights, which enforces the convention, has taken decisions in the past with which the UK has profoundly disagreed, and it pursues a living instrument doctrine, by which the judges must interpret the ECHR in the light of prevailing social and moral norms rather than appealing to the intentions of the drafters of the convention.
I am not cynical enough to suppose that the Illegal Migration Bill has been drafted purely as a provocation to the court, or to provide a populist causes belli which could enable the UK’s withdrawal from the convention. But it is true that if the new legislation were to bring the UK to the position in which it had to abandon the bill or withdraw from the ECHR, there is a substantial body of Conservative MPs who would see that as an opportunity rather than a drawback. I am very far from a cheerleader for the Strasbourg institutions, and I was a Brexiteer before it was fashionable, but I am not at the moment persuaded that the mischief of our submission to the ECHR’s provisions is great enough to justify the outward message that our departure would send.
It is also likely that the prime minister thinks that a row over immigration, and the government posing as a scourge of freeloading foreigners and tough but firm defenders of our sceptred isle, the fortress built by Nature for herself, is something which would appeal directly, powerfully and emotionally to a certain part of the Conservative movement and is therefore a potentially advantageous approach to the impending general election. It seems an easy win, providing a comforting fillip for the party’s right wing. And we know that a strategy of maximising the core vote helped David Cameron, under the guidance of Australian election supremo Lynton Crosby, win an unexpected majority in 2015.
I am not so sure. I wonder if the leadership is guilty of relying on a caricature of its own membership, seeing ruddy faces and waxed cotton jackets, copies of The Daily Express and perhaps an occasional Andy McNab novel; surely, it thinks, these are people for whom control of our borders, and by implication savage reductions in the number of people coming to the UK, will prove irresistibly attractive as a policy?
There are other ways of approaching the issue. In 2015, the liberal conservative think tank Bright Blue published a document entitled A Balanced Centre-Right Agenda on Immigration, which rejected some of the cruder stereotypes of Conservative thinking and attempted to sketch out a nuanced and realistic approach to migration. It is also essential to recognise that a campaign under the banner of “Stop the Boats” will have a much more direct and potent resonance in constituencies on the South Coast, while the government needs to be looking at a much broader battlefield if it is to have any hope of competing at the general election likely to be held in 2024.
Suella Braverman has built her political brand on unashamed and sometimes rather unsophisticated law-and-order policies, and no-one looking at her career can really dispute her logic: a year ago she was the little-known attorney general, an office which rarely leads to political greatness, yet now she is one of the most recognised members of the cabinet. It makes sense for the prime minister to make common cause with her on this issue, as it paints a picture of a a government boldly grasping a policy conundrum and “making Brexit work”, and it will reassure a certain section of the electorate that it has an emotional connection with the party which seeks to continue as its government.
Yesterday’s announcement and the publication of the Illegal Migration Bill have provided a great deal of food for thought, debate and consideration. I understand, as I say, why the government has set out to tackle this issue in this way. It makes me uneasy: the slogan “Stop the boats” is crude and vulgar, the new bill focuses the debate on immigration on a certain group of refugees, asylum seekers and would-be immigrants who are among the most vulnerable and desperate in the world (no doubt leavened by some cynical, criminal elements exploiting the system) and raises many questions which will niggle away at any voters at all open to nuance. It seeks to attract votes through the blunt force of binary choice—do you want a tough approach to people trying to get into the UK, or are you willing to see the metaphorical doors flung open and unguarded?—and, at the risk of exposing my worst hand-wringing middle-class anxieties, it’s simply unpleasant and sour, reductionist, cramped and suspicious.
Perhaps worse than that, I’m not at all sure that it will work. If we end up locked in a battle with the ECHR, or else pulling out of the convention and tearing holes in our membership of the Council of Europe, it will set a frame around our politics and the general election campaign which will make voters think of their fears and their suspicions, imagine politics as a zero-sum game in which others only gain advantage by taking it away from us. We have had election campaigns like that before, of course we have. Sometimes 1992 and 1997 were rather snappy and rebarbative, desperate to defend and preserve and so deny to others rather than think more generously; sometimes individual constituencies see grim and unappetising battles, like Smethwick in 1964, Bermondsey in 1983, Putney in 1997 or Ross, Skye and Lochaber in 2015.
If we fall into those no-holds-barred, biting-and-scratching methods of electioneering, we are meeting ourselves down. I am a Conservative, I hope desperately we can somehow find a path upwards to victory at the next general election, and I fear what a Labour government would do for the United Kingdom. But our politics as a whole, not merely in terms of individual parties, is at a desperately low ebb. The electorate is jaded and distrustful, and there is a pervasive sense of decline. This is not inevitable, but it needs every politician, and perhaps every commentator too, to reach consciously for our better selves, an optimistic and cheerful way of thinking how the UK could be better, rather than just a thin-lipped anxiety about how it could be worse. I don’t think the current approach to migration does any of that. If it is unpleasant and ineffective, then we really have thrown away an opportunity.
I think there is a fundamental, overriding question here, beyond all the legal gumph.
This whole policy relies on the idea that we must make the UK less appealing to refugees than the place they are running from. We need to ask ourselves if that is a place where we want to live?