The Channel migrant crisis is spiralling out of control

When did the scale of illegal immigration into the UK via Channel dinghies become a first order political issue for you? Perhaps you were, like me, outraged by the phenomenon from the start. If so, you will have been reassured by Boris Johnson's declaration at the outset of his premiership that those coming in this fashion would be 'sent back'. There were 1,843 such arrivals in 2019.

Maybe your hackles rose at the end of 2020, when the Government confirmed that far from deterring the trade by implementing a successful returns policy, it had received another 8,466 irregular arrivals via dinghies during that year. Or, if you were relatively slow on the uptake, maybe you only became thoroughly irked at the end of 2021 when official figures recorded 28,461 such arrivals for the year.

It could even be that it has taken 40,000 such arrivals for the year to be chalked up this weekend – with 1,000 arrivals on Saturday – to persuade you that this is now a national emergency.

No doubt there are some people still reluctant to engage with the issue, even as the powder keg of the overcrowded Manston processing centre in Kent threatens to erupt. Details about Sunday's petrol bomb attack on a migrant centre in Dover remain sketchy, but the targeting of such a place appears to be a worrying indication of tensions bubbling beneath the surface on this issue. The costs of the vast scale of hotel accommodation being provided for asylum-seeking migrants – overwhelmingly young men fleeing France – is also unsustainable for a government trying to show fiscal prudence. 

For Rishi Sunak, there are no easy answers to this migrant crisis. Some choose to kid themselves that creating more 'safe routes' can solve the issue rather than merely further increasing numbers. Others actively oppose the very notion of controlled borders and regard Imagine by John Lennon as a serious policy agenda rather than just a hippy song ('Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do'). The route to a fifth successive Tory election victory certainly doesn’t run through the Quinoa Belt constituencies where most of these folk reside. Sunak must know that.

Perhaps that’s why the PM published a 'ten-point plan' for solving the crisis as part of his Tory leadership campaign in the summer. He summed up his approach in an article in the Sunday Telegraph that repays another reading. In that article, Sunak gave himself 100 days as PM to 'set about fundamentally reforming our asylum laws' and promised his first move would be to tighten the legal definition of who qualifies for asylum in a way that would 'prevent anyone who enters the UK illegally from staying here'.

He also pledged to 'tackle' – in a manner unspecified – the European Court of Human Rights when it was being an obstacle to effective action. Sunak said he would give Parliament control of the number of refugees to be accepted by the UK each year, opening the way for refugee quotas that would not appear to comply with current obligations under international law.

That’s a pretty full agenda to enact within, what, the next 93 days. But he pledged it and he set the timetable too. One doesn’t have to be the most hardened of cynics to suppose that he will have fallen well short of the benchmarks he set when his deadline expires at the end of January.

But there are varying possible degrees of failure. He could give the Tory-leaning electorate, which continues to rank immigration & asylum as the second most important issue behind the economy sufficient signs of progress to buy himself more time. Or he could fail carelessly and blithely, just as Johnson did. Going down this latter route is not to be recommended: nothing corroded Johnson’s standing with 2019 Tory voters as much as his epic failure on this issue.

Over the next fortnight or so, much will be revealed about the character of the Sunak premiership. He could U-turn on his decision not to attend the COP27 climate summit in Egypt and commit to nothing of substance on the Channel migration shambles. This is the Johnsonian way. It would please the liberal-left establishment on both counts and yield him approximately zero extra votes. It would also do nothing to help solve a crisis that is in danger of spiralling out of control.

Or he could stay away from the summit. Instead he could concentrate on rolling out draconian measures on border control to show actual Tory-considerers that his summer pronouncements were not just hot air designed to keep his leadership bid alive.

Nobody should pretend this is an easy issue. The measures that could actually work – withdrawing from the jurisdiction of the ECHR, setting up standard offshore processing for irregular arrivals in a UK overseas territory, passing a law forbidding anyone reaching the UK illegally from gaining refugee status or permanent leave to remain – would all lead to significant blowback at home and abroad.

Critics would claim that Britain had become an outlaw nation, turning its back on the values that Churchill’s European Convention embedded post the Second World War. Sunak would be accused of breaching the terms of the EU Withdrawal Agreement and the Belfast Agreement too.

No doubt some would also seek to use his ethnicity against him, as they have done already to Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, the home secretaries sent into battle against the dinghy trade with hands tied behind their backs.

It would be far easier for Sunak just to chuck yet more taxpayers’ money at France and shake hands on a deal with President Macron about tough new targets for preventing dinghies setting out into the Channel. But given that France will not agree to the one measure that could solve the problem instantly and at almost zero cost to itself – an agreement to take back all migrants picked up in the Channel by the UK – only the most gullible of voters could believe it will be prepared to devote yet more scarce police resources to mounting effective, round-the-clock patrols of hundreds of miles of beach.

It looks like we are heading for close to 50,000 dinghy migrants arriving in 2022, with some pretty spectacular negative side-effects in terms of hotels requisitioned, scarce social housing redirected away from UK nationals, processing centres encountering disorder, taxpayers’s money being squandered.

Sunak has three months left to get a grip. To act will be difficult. To fail to act will be terminal.