The UK has a moral duty over Channel crossings – we cannot abandon it in favour of callousness

Editorial: As our Refugees Welcome campaign has made clear, the UK needs to be increasing its humanitarian commitments

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There’s nothing wrong with Priti Patel’s plan to turn back boats containing refugees and migrants in the English Channel – except that it’s immoral, legally dubious and ineffective.

The immorality of getting tough with people in extreme danger should hardly need elaboration. Men, women and children in unseaworthy vessels, in a busy sea lane in the world, without adequate supplies… what should an appropriate human response be? How about compassion, and mercy?

The example of moral leadership during this crisis has been set by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI). The lifeboats save lives, regardless of politics and treats all human beings the same. For doing the right thing, lifeboat crews – entirely dependent on public charity and volunteering – have been vilified by some public figures, who should know better, as providing a “taxi service”. The RNLI can and should do nothing else, because they won’t leave them to drown.

By contrast, Ms Patel wants Border Force crews to somehow push these flimsy vessels all the way back to French waters or even to France, presumably whether the French authorities like it or not. The consequence will be obvious; hundreds of helpless human beings left stranded in the Channel roughly where British and French waters meet. It is not difficult to imagine the worst happening.

Perhaps news of this “deterrent” will filter back to Syria or Somalia or, poignantly, to the interpreters left behind in Afghanistan that the British, and the French, are content to leave refugees to die. It is quite something for the captain and team on a Border Force vessel, or indeed a nation, to have on its conscience.

International law is unequivocal, and inconvenient from Ms Patel’s point of view. The obligations to preserve life and the human right to life are absolute imperatives. It’s no secret that Ms Patel finds the 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees (nothing to do with the EU) irksome, and is pushing legislation that erodes its provisions. That is preferable, in terms of presentation, to openly violating international laws, or sitting outside the convention and international courts. But the case remains that her new policies are eminently legally challengeable, and no doubt will be tested in due course.

Even in her terms, though, the policy won’t work. Indeed, in antagonising the French, and thus the EU, it might even make matters “worse” (in Patel terms), seeing as so much of “taking control of our borders” has been subcontracted to Paris. Her French counterpart has made it perfectly plain that he has little intention of being Ms Patel’s accomplice in breaking international rules.

The “push” factors in international migration are as stronger as ever, and more powerful than anything Ms Patel, or France and the EU for that matter, can do about it. The situation in Afghanistan is the latest illustration of that. As The Independent has made clear with our Refugees Welcome campaign, the UK has to do more to help those in need. There is no need to be acting so callously.