Why immigration could be Priti Patel’s undoing

The home secretary seems determined to be tough on migration, and to be seen to be tough on migration. But after a record number of people crossed the English Channel in one day, and with no end in sight, Sean O’Grady asks: what can she show for her efforts?

Given the persistent ‘push factors’ of war and poverty, there seems little that Patel and her Border Force can do about this crisis (Reuters)

In the great scheme of things, the number of migrants currently making the treacherous crossing to the Kent coast is relatively small. Although a record number of people – 482 – have been recorded doing so in a single day, and the total number is already higher so far this year than for the whole of 2020 (albeit in obviously unusual circumstances), the figure will probably not exceed 20,000 in 2021. That has to be set against the total net migration figure of 313,000 in 2020.

Many of the migrants wrongly labelled “illegal” have valid cause to seek asylum in the UK, and are thus genuine, legal refugees. Much of the activity in small boats is merely switching from the older methods of hiding in lorries and vans. The number of people casually overstaying their visa is also rather larger, and attracts little attention.

Nonetheless, the situation is a dangerous one for those desperate people who place their lives in the hands of unscrupulous traffickers and find themselves stranded in unseaworthy vessels in one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. The images of these people landing in England, sometimes with the humanitarian assistance of Border Force or the RNLI (a charity), have proved emotive, and are exploited for political purposes. The crisis is thus a looming political problem for the home secretary, Priti Patel.

Patel is hardly the most empathetic of political personalities, and she seems determined to be tough on migration, and to be seen to be tough on migration. Her new immigration laws deliver the vague promises of an “Australian-style points system” made by the Leave campaign in 2016 and repeated in the 2019 Conservative manifesto. She is spending another £55m paying the French authorities to help patrol Britain’s borders.

She makes no secret of her hostility to so-called illegal migrants, and her department leaks outlandish schemes to build camps for them in Rwanda, of all places. She poses for a photo-op in a Greek refugee camp condemned as “inhumane”. She is criminalising anyone who helps a refugee, with new laws that weaken the UK’s adherence to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention (and may be contrary to international and human rights laws).

Ms Patel’s problem is that the migrants just keep coming. She has Nigel Farage on her back, visiting a hotel in Patel’s constituency that houses migrants (it was otherwise empty during the Covid crisis). The usual suspects in the media are growing hysterical. Tory activists and MPs want something to show for the many grand claims to “take back control” of the UK’s borders, and the arrival of hundreds of migrants appears to make a mockery of them. Much of the electorate, though sometimes prone to outpourings of emotional sentimentalism when a dead child washes up on a beach, are simultaneously indifferent to the fate of migrants as a group.

The home secretary looks at plans for the new reception centre on Samos Island (Notis Mitarachi/Ministry of Migration and Asylum)

Given the “push” factors – war and poverty – propelling refugees and economic migrants towards western Europe, there seems little that Patel and her Border Force can do about this crisis. Her usually strong approval ratings among grassroots Conservatives are at risk of being eroded with every wave of migrants. As the party conference nears, what can she show for her efforts? What can she promise next? What can she do to stop Boris Johnson sacking her to save his own skin – a transparent survival tactic he is known to favour? He seems fond of his forceful home secretary, but she must know that he’d chuck her overboard as soon as grin at her if he was in a tight corner.

It is not impossible, given her political closeness to Australia’s former prime minister Tony Abbott, that she will start to explore another “Australian-style” policy and get the prime minister to order HM Coastguard, Border Force and the royal navy to follow the example of the royal Australian navy and “turn back” the boats, dispatching anyone who gets through to a squalid camp far away. Exactly how that might play out for real human beings on the high seas hardly bears thinking about, but it would get her a standing ovation (virtual or otherwise) when the Tories meet in Manchester next month.