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1 month ago
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As a place of accommodation, the Bibby Stockholm had only a minor function in UK asylum policy, but it loomed large as an emblem of that policy’s dysfunction. The barge moored at Portland in Dorset held 400 men at maximum capacity. The last of them disembarked this week, marking the end of the vessel’s service as a Home Office incarceration facility.
The total number of people in the UK waiting for asylum claims to be processed is around 85,600. Taking one barge out of the equation doesn’t reduce overall numbers. But it does indicate progress towards the more rational approach that Labour promised in contrast to ostentatiously punitive Conservative methods.
The Home Office says the decision not to extend use of the Bibby Stockholm next year saves £20m. The same cost-effectiveness argument is cited in cancellation of the Tories’ programme for deporting asylum claimants to Rwanda. That scheme burned through at least £318m – almost certainly more – without achieving any of its stated goals. It also degraded the UK’s credentials as a country that respects international human rights treaties and contributed to a pernicious culture of criminalising refugees in the public eye.
Sir Keir Starmer and the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, deserve some credit for clearing out the most egregiously ineffective and vindictive relics of Conservative asylum policy, although that was the easy part. The pressures that Rishi Sunak’s government clumsily and callously tried to relieve with ill-designed policy have not gone away. The Home Office spent around £3bn on accommodation for asylum seekers last year. The volume of small boats bringing more claimants across the Channel is slower when winter makes the journey harder, but the problem persists.
Now in opposition, the Tories no longer have to even try to come up with workable solutions. Their rhetoric, calibrated to win back supporters from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, risks becoming more inflammatory as a result. Racially motivated rioting and murderous threats of arson attacks on asylum seekers this summer must serve as an ominous warning of where the competitive cycle of scapegoating and vilification of migrants can lead.
Labour’s approach so far has been to emphasise efficiency in processing the claims backlog, alongside more developed international cooperation and more aggressive policing to disrupt the gangs that operate the illicit cross-Channel traffic. There is nothing inherently wrong with those ambitions. Advocates of a more open and liberal migration policy should be no less keen than anyone else to end the exploitation of vulnerable people by vicious criminals.
The missing component in Labour’s agenda is honest engagement with the incentives that drive people to turn to gangs for help. The most obvious fixable driver is an absence of safe and legal routes for people wanting asylum, which expands the market for dangerous and illegal crossings.
Reluctance to address that side of the equation flows from fear of being judged soft on border control. But that taboo shuts out consideration of measures that might work better towards the government’s stated goal – a fair and humane system – than yet another cycle of crackdowns.
In decommissioning the Bibby Stockholm and cancelling the Rwanda scheme, Labour has shown readiness to restore some decency and pragmatism to asylum policy. To those qualities ministers must add also courage, in daring to change the terms on which that policy is debated.
