Good morning. One weird trick beloved of the government over the last few difficult months has been to explain that it has been bequeathed a hopeless legacy by … somebody.
Suella Braverman, the seventh (and also fifth) home secretary since the Conservatives came to power in 2010, was the latest minister to deploy this strategy this week: as well as her incendiary claim that asylum seekers crossing the Channel in dinghies constituted an “invasion of our southern coast”, she bemoaned a “broken” system which meant that “illegal migration is out of control”.
That crisis shows no signs of abating: Diane Taylor reports that child asylum seekers say they have been urged by UK officials to claim that they are adults in order to leave the troubled asylum processing site at Manston more quickly.
Meanwhile, as several hundred of the 4,000 people at the camp – which is meant to host 1,600 – left yesterday, immigration minister Robert Jenrick distanced himself from that word “invasion” – but agreed with Braverman that infrastructure was being “overwhelmed”. And counter-terror police took over the investigation into the fire bomb attack on a migrant processing centre in Dover.
All of which might lead us to ask: how, exactly, did we get here? And is it, as Refugee Council chief executive Enver Solomon writes, “a situation of the government’s own making”? For today’s newsletter, I spoke to Alan Travis, who was the Guardian’s home affairs editor for 26 years, about the long history leading up to yet another crisis. Here are the headlines.
Five big stories
Energy | The government has “war gamed” emergency plans to cope with blackouts lasting up to seven days in the event of a national power outage amid growing fears over security of supply this winter. Documents seen by the Guardian suggest a “reasonable worst-case scenario” of a week’s severe disruption.
Politics | Former health secretary Matt Hancock has had the Tory whip suspended after agreeing to appear on the ITV show I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here because the show overlaps with time when the Commons is sitting.
Policing | Defective vetting and failures by police leaders have allowed a “prevalent” culture of potentially thousands of officers who are “predatory” towards women to join and stay in the ranks, a damning official report has concluded.
Brazil | Jair Bolsonaro refused to recognize the victory of his rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in his first appearance since the presidential election. After he spoke, his chief of staff Ciro Nogueira indicated that his administration would not contest the election result.
Israel | Former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has thanked voters for a “huge vote of confidence” as his right-wing religious bloc extended its lead with around half of all votes counted in the country’s fifth election in four years.
In depth: ‘Downhill all the way’
Alan Travis started covering the Home Office in 1992, when Ken Clarke was home secretary, “and it’s been downhill all the way since then”. At the time, immigration and asylum “were not that significant a part” of the beat, Alan said. “If you were writing about asylum, it tended to be about a single individual battle, not a big structural issue.”
Here’s a (very) potted history of how immigration became the dominant feature of the Home Office’s brief – and a near-constant source of difficulty. And for a superb long read on what went wrong at the Home Office, do see this piece from last year by Daniel Trilling, from which some of these figures are taken.
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1993-2002: Net migration grows rapidly
1993 The UK has the capacity for 250 people in immigration detention; net migration is -1000.
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1999 Net migration hits 163,000. “Over the middle and late 90s, you get the expansion of Europe to include eastern European countries, and the breakup of the former Yugoslavia,” Alan said. “That’s when it really bursts on to the scene as a massive issue capable of toppling European governments.” But there are just 10,000 refugees granted asylum or leave to remain in the same year.
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2002 The number of asylum applications to the UK reaches 84,132. Despite the continuing heat around the subject for many years afterwards and claims the UK is “overwhelmed”, the figure never hits that level again.
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2010-2018: The ‘hostile environment’
2010 David Cameron sets a net migration target of less than 100,000 as part of the Conservative manifesto. Two years later, with the coalition government under pressure for failing to deliver that goal and Ukip making ferocious attacks from the right about “foreign criminal gangs”, then-home secretary Theresa May makes the first reference to the “hostile environment” for “illegal migration”, which ultimately sets the stage for the Windrush scandal and the resignation of her successor, Amber Rudd.
One civil servant who worked under May told Trilling: “If leadership is saying, ‘We want you to treat people humanely’, you will use your initiative to treat people humanely. If leadership is saying, ‘Why is the system a mess? Why aren’t you removing people? Why are the numbers so high?’, you’re going to use your initiative and focus on reducing numbers and removing people.”
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2014 87% of asylum applicants get a decision within six months.
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2015 Immigration detention, which had capacity for 250 people per day in 1992, hits its peak of 3,500. Over the course of that year, 32,447 people are detained.
While Braverman’s use of the word “invasion” shocked many this week, it is not without antecedent: in 2015, David Cameron referred to a “swarm” of migrants at Calais waiting to reach the UK. “We’ve had an awful lot of ‘invasion thesis’ rhetoric over the past 20 years,” Alan said. “But there has been a crossover - what was meat and drink to Ukip before Brexit has now entered government. It’s been gradually legitimised.”
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2018-present: The Channel crisis
2018 Small boat crossings begin to increase, with 299 people arriving in the UK by crossing the Channel over the year. The UK and France later agree a joint action plan and pledge to make crossings an “infrequent phenomenon” by spring 2020.
“The reason it has become a much more significant phenomenon in recent years is because of success in shutting down the use of lorries to cross the Channel,” Alan said. “The point about a lorry is you aren’t visible. You don’t land on a shoreline, where your boat is left and can be filmed. So this is, in one sense, a crisis of visibility, rather than numbers. The growing backlog in asylum decisions is not accounted for by a new phenomenon of people coming here by illegal routes.”
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2019 A total of 1,843 people are detected arriving by small boats.
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2020 Some 27,000 of the 33,000 civil servants employed by the Home Office are working in borders, immigration and citizenship. A total of 8,466 people are detected arriving by small boat crossings, driven up in part by national lockdowns making road routes more difficult.
While both Braverman and her predecessor Priti Patel have claimed that those crossing the Channel are often doing so for economic reasons, in September the director general of UK Visas and Immigration acknowledges that 98% of those crossing the Channel make asylum claims.
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2021 The proportion of people who get an asylum decision within six months drops to 6%. The independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, David Neal, attributes that to factors including the abandonment of a six-month standard for claim processing in January 2019, inadequate training, and high staff turnover. Meanwhile, 28,526 people cross the Channel in small boats. In November, 27 people in a single dinghy drown as they attempt the crossing.
Some 44% of appeals against Home Office decisions to deny asylum claims result in success. Jeremy Gibb, a retired immigration judge, told Trilling that the Home Office often fights cases it knows it will lose because “they are terrified … that any concession by them that can be perceived as soft or liberal or sympathetic, might leak out and be another set of Daily Mail or Sun or Telegraph stories”.
“There is a Daily Mail test,” Alan agreed. “But the Home Office can have liberal moments, too, even among Tory home secretaries sometimes. It’s too simple to say there’s something in the water there that turns everyone into an authoritarian. All we can do is keep arguing for it to have more liberal moments.”
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2022 The proportion of asylum claims approved hits 76%, including 49% of initial decisions on those arriving by small boats. (By late August, just 6,910 of those crossing the Channel since 2018 have had a decision at all.)
So far this year, almost 40,000 people have made the Channel crossing by boat. While the government has blamed a spike in young Albanian men making the crossing and expressed scepticism about their asylum claims, they account for 12,000 of the total – and the final annual figure would still be up on 2021 without a single Albanian.
David Neal sends Priti Patel a damning report on the Channel crisis which warns that the Home Office is responsible for “a refusal to transition from an emergency response to what has rapidly become steady state” – that is, failing to put in place adequate systems to deal with a predictable problem.
Part of the explanation for the failure, Alan said, is “that resources had to be found to deal with Ukrainian refugees and those from Hong Kong – I don’t think people appreciate that we have more than 140,000 Ukrainians and 133,000 Hong Kong Chinese in the UK. Those schemes have not been badly handled – but the 75,000-odd in the UK who arrived by irregular means have been neglected.”
“In some ways, being driven by crisis management is just the nature of the Home Office,” said Alan. “They firefight. But there are obvious things that would help, like cancelling the criminally expensive Rwanda scheme and putting that money into speeding up asylum decisions. But we have a home secretary who is not even interested in solving the problems – who just wants to take up ideologically useful positions.”
While only 10% of the public say that immigration and asylum are the most important issues facing the UK, the home secretary remains committed to a draconian approach, rejecting measures like allowing claims to be processed in France in favour of the pursuit of her dream of finally getting a plane-load’s worth of asylum seekers off to Rwanda. She renews Cameron’s aspiration of reaching “tens of thousands” of migrants each year.
The “invasion” of the UK puts it 18th in the European table of asylum seekers granted protection per capita. People who originally came to the UK seeking asylum make up just 0.6% of the population. Half of them have been in the country for more than 16 years.
What else we’ve been reading
Simon Hattenstone’s interview with Mr Motivator, AKA Derrick Evans (above), was a delightful read. The earnest conversation about Evan’s life and his battles against racism on screen is punctuated with levity and awkwardness as he teases Hattenstone about his interview style and manners. Nimo
It’s Hyde on Hancock! “He has immediately lost the Tory whip. But maybe he’ll find something much more precious – himself.” Archie
Matthew Cantor goes under the skin of the satirical news site the Onion as it turns 35. Cantor speaks to those behind the bizarre, hilarious and often dark headlines that are a key part of the 21st-century cultural zeitgeist. Nimo
This long piece for the New York Times by David Wallace-Wells is a fantastically clarifying assessment of the state of the climate crisis – and how “the window of possible futures is narrowing”. Wallace-Wells finds a flinty sort of optimism that feels all the more sustaining and real for sitting alongside reasons for despair. Archie
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been charged with accusations of neo-colonialism and using domineering practices against countries, predominately in the global south. But when the world is sinking into a debt crisis, who else steps in? Jamie Martin looks at the nations who are figuring out alternative ways to protect themselves against future economic turmoil. Nimo
Sport
Cricket | Jos Buttler praised the quality and character of his team after they emerged from a must-win game against New Zealand, the form side of the T20 World Cup so far, with a victory that leaves them in control of their own destiny and a place in the semi-finals within reach.
Champions League | Tottenham Hotspur finished top of their group with a 2-1 comeback victory over Marseille. Meanwhile, Liverpool finished second in their group with a 2-0 victory over Napoli, who finished top.
Women’s Rugby League World Cup | England thrashed Brazil 72- 4 in the opening game of the tournament at Headingley. The match against Brazil Amazonas, playing only their third game of rugby league, set a crowd record for the women’s game in the UK.
The front pages
This morning’s Guardian print edition leads with “Revealed: secret ‘war game’ plans to cope with seven-day blackouts”. The picture is I’m A Celebrity-bound Matt Hancock, whom the Mirror calls “The man with no shame”. The Sun quotes the same writing for the newspaper, saying: “I haven’t lost my marbles … but I’m off to join the creepy-crawlies”. Meanwhile, Metro calls him “King of the bungle”. “Suspended! Fury over Hancock joining I’m A Celeb” – that’s the Daily Express. The Daily Mail echoes warnings that there are “Thousands’ of corrupt police on our streets”, while the Times says “Criminals and predators” have joined the ranks of the force. The i’s lead story is “New £880 hike to Britain’s mortgage bills”. In the Financial Times, the front-page splash is “Bumper earnings raise pressure on oil majors to help ease cost of living crisis”. And the money needed to fix things is on the Daily Telegraph’s mind as well: “NHS seeks £7bn extra to tackle backlogs”.
Today in Focus
Just Stop Oil and the threat of the public order bill
As the UN’s environment agency reports there is “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place”, climate activists resort to extreme actions to draw attention to the climate crisis. Damien Gayle reports on the Just Stop Oil group and the government bill designed to crack down on “disruptive” protest
Cartoon of the day | Martin Rowson
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
Rhiane Fatinikun wanted to take up hiking, but she wasn’t comfortable walking miles through the countryside alone. So she set up a group on Instagram called Black Girls Hike (BGH). It was an immediate hit and 14 people turned up for the first walk. BGH was a great place to meet new people, make friends and do something that might seem too intimidating to do alone. Fatinikun used to have a lot of reservations about hiking, but says: “When you actually go there and realise it’s overwhelmingly positive and friendly, then you start thinking about all the other barriers you’ve created in your mind to trying things. It opens doors.”
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Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s crosswords to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until tomorrow.
