It is a point of international law and a sound moral principle that people seeking sanctuary from persecution should not be punished for the method by which they arrive in a place of safety. Asylum is granted on the basis of need, not as a conditional judgment of the route taken.
It follows that those who seek asylum should not be treated as effective prisoners while their claims are being processed. That principle has long been flouted in practice by the UK and is formally repudiated by the Illegal Migration Act, the legislative device by which Rishi Sunak hopes to satisfy his pledge to “stop the boats” that carry migrants across the Channel.
The mere fact of having made that journey now leads to automatic disqualification from entitlement to asylum in the UK, regardless of the validity of the claim. Since there are very few legal ways for refugees to reach Britain, it is a reasonable assumption that thousands of victims of persecution who are desperate to find safety in Britain will, instead, be categorised as “illegal”.
In theory, they will then be deported, either to their country of origin or Rwanda (but only if the supreme court agrees with the government that they will be safe there). Over the weekend, it was briefed that the UK overseas territory of Ascension Island, 4,000 miles away, is being considered as an alternative. The likelihood of deportations to the middle of the South Atlantic before the next election is next to zero. In reality, most arrivals will be detained in Britain, swelling the numbers already in limbo with their unprocessed claims stalled in Home Office bureaucracy. The backlog is around 166,000.
Those people need somewhere to live, which is where the Bibby Stockholm, a barge moored in Portland, Dorset, comes into the picture. Today, the first asylum claimants took up their berths – more accurately their cells – on this floating detention facility. The government’s agenda here is nakedly political and performative. The priority is getting them out of hotels, which are not necessarily more costly than other forms of accommodation but are politically awkward because the word implies comfort.
Mr Sunak wants people inside and outside the country to know that Britain is an inhospitable destination. The domestic audience is supposed to be reassured that no one is gaming the system and the international audience is meant to be deterred from making the journey.
Neither signal will work. There is no evidence that draconian laws persuade refugees to look elsewhere for sanctuary, nor is there any precedent for sustained Home Office nastiness satisfying voters who are convinced that Britain is a soft touch. Increasing levels of meanness only succeeds in making the system less functional – potentially lethally so, as recent concerns over fire safety on the Bibby Stockholm have made clear. A more vindictive bureaucracy is not a more efficient one, while policy designed to advertise the harshness of a regime simply increases public animosity to the people who suffer most from that regime’s failures.
The banal reality is that Britain’s asylum system is not working for much the same reason that so many other public services are falling apart after 13 years of Conservative government: inadequate budgets and a lack of political will to address institutional reform.
Neither the politics nor the administration of asylum is easy. The traffic in people across the Channel is a criminal activity. But the most common victims of that crime are people who feel they have no other way to find sanctuary. The government’s determination to cast them as offenders, meeting their plea for safety with incarceration, is as stupid as it is cruel.
