by K.H.
In Rishi Sunak’s first televised interview of 2023 on 8th January, the new PM blundered through veteran BBC politico Laura Kuennsberg’s questioning, trying hard to deny crises and downplay his personal political weaknesses. This was not the first time, over the Christmas period Sunak had been criticised for asking a homeless man if he was ‘interested in getting into’ the UK finance industry, and faced attacks from a new organised ‘faction’ of the right in the Conservative party. In that interview, Sunak was explicitly asked ‘why would anyone under 50 vote Conservative?’, Sunak’s response was that they were dealing with NHS backlogs and…small boats?
This article is mostly about Britain’s ongoing refugee crisis, but it’s also about the British government’s rhetorical and administrative decline in recent years. In an article I wrote for the Beaver in 2022 titled ‘#AbolishTheHomeOffice: Reforming the UK’s worst government department’, I critiqued the UK government’s maintenance of a department which made crime, immigration, and national security synonymous concepts. This certainly remains an institutional problem, but at the time I had not necessarily anticipated the issue’s incessant leakage into political discourse that has occurred throughout the last 8 months. In fact, this crisis – while apparently moderating Tory rhetoric – has led anti-immigration extremists within the Conservative party to become bolder and more influential than ever before; triggering even Rishi Sunak, considered a relatively liberal PM, to claim that the public hate ‘small boats’ because it is ‘unfair’. Yet, following Brexit and massive underinvestment in most public services, we remain unable to deal with the problem of immigration in any reasonable fashion.
The truth is that now the situation – particularly on asylum – is far worse than at the time of previous writing. This difficult winter has deeply impacted refugees, with poor heating, inadequate disease control, and shrinking space for asylum seekers in processing camps, such as the Manston processing facility. Being short of space in their camps, the Home Office has been spending extortionate amounts on privately-run hotel accommodation for asylum seekers, and continues to have inadequate administrative capacity to process their claims. Earlier this year, a far-right terrorist attempted to firebomb a camp in Dover, and the government responded ineffectually by doubling down on their existing rhetoric and policy – including on the 13th of January, when a video was released of Suella Braverman being challenged by a Holocaust survivor on that very rhetoric. Indeed, last year saw the highest number of refugees attempt to cross the Channel in over a decade, with over 45,000 asylum seekers making the dangerous journey. However, following this, the Home Office has made no obvious effort to accelerate processing of individuals’ asylum claims beyond their proposed ‘New Plan for Immigration’ – a controversial plan that includes measures to send refugees to Rwanda and Albania.
Amid all the present crises, we might rightfully wonder why Sunak and Braverman are so focused on channelling focus towards the refugee crisis. Is it a distraction to draw away from other crises perhaps? Unclear and unverifiable. Is it an attempt at politically leveraging against Labour? Possible, but again unverifiable. Instead, it seems there are two main motivations for the current Tory line. Firstly, the Tories genuinely believe that the public dislike refugee boats crossing the Channel, or at least a substantial enough subset that they are convinced this will affect the next election. Some polling seems to suggest this has a basis, but this polling is not always completely clear, often inadvertently presenting the immigrants themselves as the political problem, rather than the crossings. Secondly, the British state is currently institutionally-rigged to believe immigration is a bad thing. Following on from my past argument about the Home Office’s institutional flaws, recent years have revealed how the British state’s aversion to immigration is rooted in a persistent governmental anxiety about the scale of immigration amid ever-weakening state administrative capacity.
When the Afghan withdrawal took place in 2021, the public saw just how worn down the Home Office had become. Foreign and Home Office civil servants were overburdened with thousands of phone-in requests for extraction, including those in the personal offices of Dominic Raab, then Foreign Secretary, who also happened to be on a holiday he refused to return from at that time. This wasn’t necessarily new, the government’s immigration and asylum-handling departments were already struggling, what was different was that it was now in the public eye. Ukraine too last year shone a light on this administrative crisis. While European countries welcomed Ukrainian refugees with open arms, the UK flailed and cited national security concerns and ‘workflow’ issues, delaying the implementation of the ‘families’ scheme for several months. The increased public attention to regular asylum claims is certainly new, but we should not be misled to believe that the problems with the system are hyper-modern and purely down to our governmental crisis. This was a long-term neglect of the immigration issue by the current Conservative government.
Place yourself in the shoes of David Cameron 10 years ago for a moment. Your view of the core spolicies of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government was essentially budget cuts, cutting immigration, and welfare ‘reform’ – all while pursuing a sort of soft Europhilia. The problem was that these goals were ultimately incompatible in the long-term. When the Conservatives eventually got their own majority in 2015, they attempted to unleash their full policy portfolio upon Britain. It is difficult to know whether they (David Cameron and George Osborne namely) knew of the likely consequences of their decisions 8 years later, but there is no doubt they are responsible. The institutionalisation of an obsessive budgeting mentality for political purposes, rather than planning based on social (and therefore economic) costs meant that ministers and MPs were constantly being asked to consider decisions which would weaken Britain’s ability to make phone calls.
What we now need is a return to rational decision-making on immigration. The small boats problem is a product of much deeper institutional and political decision-making which spans this whole last period of Conservative-led government. By promising to impose restrictions on immigration while also making public service cuts, the Conservatives trapped themselves politically and have seriously undermined Britain’s capacities to meet our international moral and legal duties. Though we may cast around the abolition of the Home Office as a potential solution to these problems, the last few months and indeed years have demonstrated that this is a problem with the broader mindset of the government, not simply a single-issue or single department failure.
