There will be no ‘delivery’ on migration, whatever Suella Braverman says

Ditching the ECHR or ‘banning’ migrants isn’t feasible for this government

Suella Braverman at the Conservative conference in Birmingham on Tuesday (Getty Images)

At first glance, Suella Braverman seems to have been created to make Priti Patel seem acceptable. It’s possible that Braverman is more polite than Patel when confronted with officials offering unwelcome advice, but on the substance of her policies she is just as extreme and, more to the point, doomed as her predecessors.

It is now well over a decade since David Cameron promised to get net migration down to the tens of thousands, and more than six years since the Brexit referendum Leave campaigns promised that the UK would “take back control” of Britain’s borders. The 2019 Conservative manifesto promised an Australian-style points system, a rather vague commitment, and “there will be fewer lower-skilled migrants and overall numbers will come down”.

Ms Patel did enact an Australia-style points system and the Rwanda refugee deportation scheme (legally paused and not in the 2019 manifesto). However, she did not succeed, at least as far as her critics were concerned, in controlling migration. Hence her departure and the arrival of the energetic Ms Braverman. Predictably, she is taking an even tougher approach; equally plainly, it won’t work.

Ms Braverman would like to make it impossible for people who cross the channel on small boats to claim asylum. She will pass a law preventing it, she has said. This would, on her own terms, be fine – except that, under the 1953 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and various UN declarations, Britain is obliged to offer asylum to anyone who has a valid claim. It doesn’t matter if they arrived on a dinghy, a jumbo jet or a space hopper.

The Johnson administration had an answer to this, albeit a flawed one. It was a version of “cakeism”. The new British Bill of Rights, pioneered by then justice secretary Dominic Raab, was in effect to introduce a new concept of illegal asylum seekers. This would be valid in UK law, but not consistent with international law. It was perhaps hoped nobody would notice, perhaps acting only as a deterrent, as with the Rwanda plan.

Now all that has been junked, and Raab and Patel sacked. But what Braverman proposes will also clash with international treaty law, the ECHR. She said during her leadership bid that she would take the UK out of the ECHR if necessary. However, despite a majority in the Commons of more than 70, it seems this is not a practical possibility. The business secretary, Jacob Rees-Mogg, has admitted as much.

So Braverman will go through the same sorry cycle as her predecessors, promising to get migration down, failing and then trying to blame “lefty lawyers” and the EU, which has nothing to do with the ECHR.

Of course, the unspoken fact is that under the EU’s Dublin III Regulation, Britain had a much better chance of returning asylum seekers to continental Europe and more willing cooperation from the French authorities, as opposed to the mercenary and expensive practice of paying them to try to patrol a vast coastline. The Royal Navy won’t “push them back” or tow them out into the Atlantic, and, along with the UK Border Force and the RNLI, they are obliged under the international law of the sea to rescue anyone at risk of drowning.

Without withdrawal from the ECHR, Braverman will fail. The only options left are to rejoin the EU or accept that unskilled and skilled migrants can help solve Britain’s chronic shortage of workers, which is fuelling inflation and making Kwasi Kwarteng’s life difficult. It would mean joined-up government thinking, and it is not going to happen. Open and accessible legal routes to asylum would also help, but, apart from the Afghan, Hong Kong and Ukraine schemes, these are anathema to Conservatives even if their antecedents were refugees. There will be no “delivery” on migration, whatever Braverman says.