I will support the measures that the new Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has announced, which are designed to regain control of our borders, but I don’t believe they will deliver the result that she wants.
Returning the grant of asylum to a temporary measure, until it is safe to return, rather than long term resettlement, which is what it has become, is entirely right and, to be honest, long overdue.
The problem is that, the opposition to the measures that she announced this week, came principally from her own back-benches. Many of her proposals, and even her language, just do not chime with Labour’s DNA. You have to remember that we are dealing with so many politicians that campaigned against every flight deporting violent criminals back to the Caribbean.
The measures are far reaching and will require primary legislation. We have already seen the Government abandon its very modest proposals to cut welfare bills in the face of a back-bench rebellion. We will have to see how Mahmood’s determination and stamina lasts over what will be a gruelling campaign.
Irrespective of the importance of the proposals she has made, they are undermined, and rendered impotent by two vital omissions.
First, she is relying on A) telling our judges how to interpret our commitments under the European Convention on Human Rights and, B) negotiating changes in the Convention itself.
A) won’t work because our courts import case law and jurisprudence from the court in Strasbourg. And B) won’t work because it will require unanimity by all signatories to the treaty, which is simply not currently to be had, nor any time soon. The only realistic course is to withdraw from the Convention, which she won’t.
Second, You have to have somewhere safe to send people to when you cannot send them back to their own countries, either because you can’t get the agreement of those countries, or because sending them there really would amount to torture or death.
The last Government had a solution: the agreement with Rwanda, at a cost of £700 million – a ‘snip’ compared with the current costs of our asylum system. It would have been worth waiting to see what the impact of the first flights to Rwanda would have been, but the election intervened and the incoming government wrote-off the investment by closing the scheme before it had got underway.
Mahmood is now looking for somewhere else they can be sent to. I wish her the best of luck.