Asylum policies should be effective and fair. Conservatives' system is broken and cruel – Brian Wilson

The problem is not the number of people claiming asylum but the UK Government’s monumental failure to deal with them

The number of asylum seekers who illegally crossed the English Channel in small boats since 2018 has topped the 100,000 mark, or so the headlines declared as if a threshold of public indignation had been crossed. Is this a shocking number? Last year saw 1.2 million people migrating legally into the UK, while 557,000 left, which creates some perspective.

If the average 20,000 a year who risked their lives in small boats disappeared into the 67 million who inhabit our islands, they would have created the tiniest of blips. I do not recommend that solution but the figures provide necessary perspective which raises the immediate question. Why has it proved so impossible for the government of the United Kingdom to deal fairly and promptly with these 20,000 people a year?

If they did so, then Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s histrionics could be avoided. Those with a legitimate claim would remain. Those without entitlement would be removed, just as elsewhere in the system. Instead, we have an endless saga of demeaning “solutions”, like the ridiculous barge at Portland.

The problem does not lie in the number of arrivals but the monumental failure to deal with them. It is a deception to pretend that this is, to any significant extent, a crisis created by the illegal Channel crossings which merely symbolise a much wider malaise.

According to the Refugee Council, 172,758 people are awaiting the outcome of their asylum claims. How many barges would it take to deal with that backlog which has arisen under a Tory government which now resorts to doomed gestures as cover?

Scotland is at a safe distance from the Channel and few of these migrants show interest in proceeding beyond the M25. However, we live on a small island and every part of it is entitled to a rational, humane immigration policy that is enforceable. Internal borders would create a new set of problems rather than solutions.

The Channel traffic should be deterred; not because it threatens to “swamp” us but on grounds of safety and fairness. It prioritises those who found means to pay criminal gangs. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands wait in refugee camps to find a legal home in a safe country.

The best deterrent to those with no entitlement does not lie in wild gestures involving planes and barges but an efficient system to deal with claims. A competent government would make these distinctions quickly and fairly without clogging up seaside hotels or pursuing Draconian alternatives. Instead, they allowed the system to become overrun.

It’s a while since I dealt with immigration cases but my experience was of a UK process that was patient and fair. We are not a cruel country, or at least we weren’t until Ms Braverman came along. The fact over a million people a year find their way here scarcely suggests a ruthless state protected by prejudice and border guards.

Whether people arrive via airports, ports or south coast beaches, each case should be treated on individual merit and all should deliver outcomes within a reasonable timescale through a fair, transparent process. Abandonment of that straightforward principle has created the current mess and restoring it will be the duty of an incoming government.

They might also ask: what would be the relative cost of employing enough immigration staff to deal with these cases within weeks rather than years as opposed to the wildly expensive stunts of threatening expulsion to Rwanda, or why not Ascension Island, or indeed piling them onto a barge in Dorset? The focus on the Channel, with relatively small numbers involved, diverts attention from the problems of the asylum system as a whole.

This point was made by the Home Affairs Select Committee last year when it recalled that “even after the sharp increase in Channel crossings in 2021, the number seeking asylum in the UK was just over half the number who applied in 2002” although the backlog of outstanding asylum cases “has doubled since 2014". The all-party committee’s report added acidly: “While we agree with the Home Secretary that the asylum system is broken, we invite her to make it clear, given the long-term and growing pressures on the system, that it was not migrants crossing the Channel who broke it.”

With so much focus on “stopping the boats”, it seems puzzling that, after five years, there has been so little success in tracking and prosecuting the criminals behind them. There are plenty exploited people who know to whom they paid the money and so on up the chain. Yet nobody seems to end up in court. Maybe that would be a more productive question for Ms Braverman to demand answers on.

Nobody should pretend that immigration policy is easy for any government, left or right. However, the Tories have got themselves into a particular mess. They secured Brexit largely on the back of anti-migrant prejudice. They promised to bring immigration down. Yet, in the real world, immigration continues to rise and their only answer is to talk tough on the Channel – and then that fails too.

The UK’s problems with illegal immigration are minuscule compared to the Mediterranean and that isn’t going to recede any time soon. We had better get used to the fact that the poor of the world will increasingly seek access to a fraction of our relative wealth and security. No number of threats or gimmicks will diminish that aspiration.

Most of us are products of migration at some point in our family backgrounds. We should be better at recognising benefits rather than threats. And if we are to be a society at peace with itself, we need immigration and asylum policies which pass the tests of humanity and fairness, rather than playing to a gallery that can never be appeased.