, an unmanageable backlog of applications, overcrowding at immigration detention centres – would be ameliorated if the large and increasing volume of small boats making their way from France were to be halted. To be fair, the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, in a newspaper column today, proposes some decent and practical changes that would perhaps improve things marginally: a bespoke new unit in the National Crime Agency, for example, with 'hundreds of specialist officers dedicated to working with forces across Europe to break the organised criminal gangs'. The cost of this new unit would come from the scrapping of the Government's Rwanda scheme which Cooper says has failed. 'Failed' is another interesting word, usually referring to a scheme or idea which, on being implemented, is found not to have worked. Strange, then, that the Rwanda scheme is already being described as 'failed' before even a single flight carrying a single asylum applicant has taken off. Shouldn't policies be judged a success or failure based on the outputs of that policy? As it happens, the Rwanda policy's lack of implementation so far works to){kind=link}
Ironically, the only “bold” part of Labour’s offer is the scrapping of the Rwanda scheme – a move that carries zero risk for the party
What makes the current migrant problem a “crisis”? Is it the pressure on hotels leased by the Home Office to accommodate asylum seekers waiting on their decision? Is it the backlog of applicants whose decisions are pending? Or is it the growth of the criminal gangs who traffic vulnerable people from one country to another? Perhaps what makes this a crisis is the lack of cooperation between British and French police forces and the paucity of security arrangements on the French side of the Channel.
The vast majority of British citizens, watching the daily TV footage of the new arrivals on our southern shores, would, I suspect, point to the exponential upwards trajectory of such arrivals in the last few years to justify the use of the term “crisis”. Every other issue – inappropriate hotel accommodation (and the safeguarding issues that arise from it), an unmanageable backlog of applications, overcrowding at immigration detention centres – would be ameliorated if the large and increasing volume of small boats making their way from France were to be halted.
To be fair, the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, in a newspaper column today, proposes some decent and practical changes that would perhaps improve things marginally: a bespoke new unit in the National Crime Agency, for example, with “hundreds of specialist officers dedicated to working with forces across Europe to break the organised criminal gangs”. The cost of this new unit would come from the scrapping of the Government’s Rwanda scheme which Cooper says has failed.
“Failed” is another interesting word, usually referring to a scheme or idea which, on being implemented, is found not to have worked. Strange, then, that the Rwanda scheme is already being described as “failed” before even a single flight carrying a single asylum applicant has taken off. Shouldn’t policies be judged a success or failure based on the outputs of that policy?