The numbers of migrants crossing the channel in small boats has now exceeded 200,000.
Rather than diminishing with every new initiative –‘smashing the gangs’; the one-in/ one-out agreement with France; and now a further £600 million investment to pay for French riot police on the beaches- on the contrary, the numbers are accelerating again.
I’ve said it all before, but I believe it is worth repeating, there is no silver bullet. Rather a whole series of initiatives are needed including those already listed. More important however, are agreements with countries of origin for the return of their citizens. And most important of all, a third country where migrants can be sent when they simply cannot be returned to where they originated from.
The reality is that, without this essential probability of removal to a third country, migrants will make repeated attempts to cross the channel with the near certainty, that once they get here, the possibility of being removed is very remote indeed.
That third country in which British taxpayers invested £700 million was to be Rwanda. The current government wrote off that investment and abandoned the scheme before it could be implemented, since when they’ve been casting around for another without success.
There is another essential element that would have been necessary to make Rwanda, or any other third country workable: Legal certainty. So long as our own courts or the ECHR in Strasbourg can intervene to prevent the deportation of illegal migrants to a third country, then that enterprise is doomed, and with it the whole possibility of stopping the boats.
The essential piece of the jigsaw therefore, is to withdraw from the treaties and human rights laws that afford the courts the power to intervene.
Hitherto, It is from this last essential requirement that politicians shrink. There is a moral hazard in not doing so. The migrants who cross the channel in small boats will have paid very substantial sums to criminals in order to do so. Having arrived here they will be accommodated at great expense funded from our overseas development budget which would otherwise be deployed helping many thousands more people in desperate need elsewhere. As a former minister who had responsibility for that budget, I can vouch for the fact that the money goes very much further in the regions from which the migrants are coming. Resettlement in the UK is the least cost-effective way of deploying our resources when it comes to helping people in greatest need.