Patel talks tough, but she won’t lift a finger

By Pete North - March 24, 2021

The 1951 Convention on Refugees is an old piece of legal technology. It still has relevance, and we should still seek to safeguard the human rights of refugees and ensure a basic level of protection. We would expect that a relatively wealthy country would abide by the principles of it and play an active part internationally in safeguarding the lives of vulnerable people.

Most people would not take issue with that. A minority of ethno-nationalists probably would, and it is safe to say say that some of the opposition to settling refugees in the UK is motivated by racism. But that has been used as an excuse not to engage with the reality that what we see in Dover is the product of a network of organised crime which exists to exploit the weakness of international law for profit.

Most people want to be fair about this. Most wouldn’t take issue with rehoming some refugees but the issue is contentious because the system is exploited, facilitated by a sector of the legal profession and the NGOcracy – which takes delight in circumventing rules designed to discriminate between refugee and economic migrant.

Successive government have failed resolve this issue precisely because it is difficult to discriminate resulting in a bureaucratic clearing system that sees people warehoused in suboptimal conditions, trapped in asylum seeker limbo. Finding a solution that is both politically and legally workable evades us.

In part, this is down to the lack of honest and serious engagement. The NGOcracy would have it that abusers are small in number, and the criminal aspect has been overblown by right wing tabloids. Perhaps that is true, but Brits are quite prickly about systems designed to help the needy being exploited. We take the same dim view of benefit cheats and view bogus asylum seekers in the same light. There is a particular principle that must be upheld – and in both instances, we’re willing to maintain a large bureaucracy to ensure the system is fair to all stakeholders – including the taxpayer.

In this, there is nothing any government can do that will not provoke the ire of the largely leftist NGOcracy. Priti Patel today has announced a new package of measures, which NGOcracy spokesthing, Bella Sankey, says are “sociopathic”. “The most bitter, callous and bullying set of public policy proposals in my lifetime. A department that can put these forward – with a straight face – is not fit for purpose”.

At least we can agree that the department is not fit for purpose. The measures include the old hat of “tougher sentences” for people smugglers which, though superficially, pleasing, does not translate into meaningful action or act as much of a deterrent. We are again given vague assurances that the clearing system (and deportations) will be speeded up and new arrivals will be prevented from gaining immediate access to the asylum system if they travelled through a safe country.

This is likely to be legally contentious. The vast majority would view France as a safe country but the NGOcracy and activist legal sector does not (and the courts, in respect of certain circumstances) seem to agree. Thus, with that weakness baked into the system by way of legal precedent, there remains a loophole that renders any new measures largely inert. We can expect to see the government challenged in court once again, and we will again be having the same old tiresome debates which have not really changed for the better part of twenty years.

Tough talking Priti Patel will soon find herself up against all those bothersome civil servants who remind her what she’s trying to do is likely illegal, she’ll throw her weight around, cause her civil servants to transfer out of the department and we’ll be back here again.

In the meantime we’ll see a continued stream of arrivals met by the border force and RNLI, escorted to temporary lodgings, with only a fraction deported and the rapes, murders and arson will continue unabated. We were assured that France would do more to prevent voyages across the channel but as the weather warms up this year, we’ll soon see how meaningless French promises are.

Thusly, this issue looks to be a permanent fixture in our politics until a more radical overhaul of the system takes place which must include revisions to, or withdrawal from, the 51 Convention. Presently either seems unlikely, particularly since spineless Tories are more troubled by the wailing of lefty NGOs than the wishes of voters.

Though the likes of Bella Snakey will wail on television that Patel is a big meanie, what they miss is that Patel has in fact already capitulated. Ask any migration NGO how to solve the problem and they will always say to open up more safe and legal routes – which is precisely what the government has done. Instead of meeting migrants in the Channel, we’ll be bussing them in from France on the ferry. Essentially this government is doing what it does best. If it cannot solve a problem, it will do whatever it takes to get it out of the news.

Today we see Tory MPs retweeting the latest of Patel’s non-measures with a view to placating the Tory right, but it doesn’t look like anyone’s buying it – and nor should they. The truth of the matter is that the Johnson administration doesn’t have the stones (or the intellectual coherence) to make any serious moves on controlling immigration or reforming asylum. The latter would no doubt result in retaliatory measures from Europe thereby creating more problems.

I would venture that if a solution is to be found then it will have to be an international effort working in conjunction with an aid and development agenda, and if we take a quota of genuine refugees from displacement camps within Africa then we buy ourselves the moral and political authority to come down hard on economic migrants.

But then we won’t do that either. As much as attitudes to aid and development have soured, that still wouldn’t be enough for the NGOcracy who would still wail were we to take robust measures on smuggled migrants, and for as long as we have a government that cowers at the thought of bad press from the left, they will cave in every single time.

For all that the left insists the Johnson government is a populist right wing government, there is actually no evidence of that. It has doubled down on Net Zero and the “green revolution” and immigration policy, notwithstanding Brexit, is no different to the Blair era. This administration is even weaker than that of Theresa May. They’ll throw the right the occasional bone, and Patel’s fan boys will lap it up, but we’re still being taken for fools.