The Guardian view on Labour and asylum: in retreat from decency | Editorial

7 hours ago 1

One of Sir Keir Starmer’s first actions on becoming prime minister was to cancel the previous government’s scheme for deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. It was the right decision for practical and ethical reasons. The Rwanda scheme was an expensive failure that put Britain in breach of international treaty obligations and promised to prolong the trauma of refugees.

Labour’s alternative policy is contained in the border security, asylum and immigration bill that passed its second reading in the Commons this week. The proposed law creates new police powers to disrupt the traffic of small boats smuggling people across the Channel. A new border security command will have powers like those deployed in counter-terrorism operations.

There is a valid rationale in focusing policy on the criminal gangs that run the illegal boat crossings – and put many lives in jeopardy in the process. And if that emphasis were matched with the creation of safe routes for people to seek asylum in Britain, the combination would start to look like a functional system – ruthless in shutting down the lethal route, humane in opening a legal one.

But the second part of that proposition is absent. Worse, the government has discreetly preserved one of the egregiously uncharitable features of the junked Conservative policy. In guidance for assessment of naturalisation claims, the Home Office stipulates that applicants who have “made a dangerous journey will normally be refused citizenship”. The fact of having come to Britain by unlawful means should, in the official Home Office view, mean disqualification under the test of whether a claimant is of “good character”.

This implies that tens of thousands of people whose claims to asylum are recognised as legitimate and who, in some cases, have settled in the UK on that basis, are barred from becoming citizens. They will be trapped in an administrative no man’s land. This isn’t the same as the Conservative statute that barred small boat passengers from even making asylum claims in the UK – and thereby breached UN refugee conventions, which stipulate that entitlement to sanctuary is not conditional on the means of arrival in a safe haven. But there is now less divergence between the Labour and Tory approaches than was promised.

The Conservatives justified their policy with a theory of deterrence. Withdrawing the prospect of asylum was supposed to discourage people from making the journey, although there was no evidence of any such effect. The undeclared motive was the hope that a performance of obstruction would appeal to voters who were abandoning the Tories for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. It looks as if Labour, facing a similar electoral challenge, has inherited the same neurosis.

The Conservatives made bad policy that ramped up the salience of illegal migration as an issue without persuading anyone that their methods were sufficient to deal with it. Sir Keir is replicating that blunder. The error could be doubly costly. Reform will not be neutralised by yet more amplification of their favourite campaign themes by the Home Office, while many Labour supporters will be appalled. It might not be possible to design an asylum system that satisfies everyone, but one that is pragmatic and humane will garner more support than one that is neither. Sir Keir seemed to understand that in opposition. It is an insight he will regret abandoning in government.

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International | Politik|