Liberals and the small boats

One of the most frustrating aspects of this summer’s political debate – if that is the right word – about small boats crossings of the Channel was the absence of Liberal political voices. In part this was the Liberal Democrats’ own doing. Since July the Liberal Democrat press office has produced precisely one media release on the subject, which said only that the crisis was the Conservatives’ fault and that the government should speed up the processing of asylum seekers’ claims.

That is a pity, especially because when Ed Davey was eventually asked to explain what his views were, he had some very interesting things to say, including that no one should trust Nigel Farage on the issue of Channel crossing because one of the causes of the crisis was Farage’s beloved Brexit. Davey explained that outside the EU, Britain cannot claim the protection of the Dublin III Regulation to send asylum seekers back to France (or technically to the member state where the asylum seeker first entered the EU or had most recently lived for more than five months). Academic researchers have been picking up for some time evidence that potential small boat passengers have realised that, at least before the recent Franco-British deal, if they reached Britain, unlike the situation in EU countries, they could not be sent back.

But the Franco-British deal will not solve the problem by itself. Researchers point to another important reason for Brexit being at the heart of the Channel crisis, namely that Britain is outside a different aspect of the EU’s common asylum policy, the system for enforcing the rule that if a claim fails in one member state it effectively fails for all other EU member states. To ensure that claimants cannot move to another member state to make a new claim EU countries collect and share applicants’ fingerprints. Britain is now outside that system, and so the British authorities have no access to the fingerprint data or to whether the person making the claim has previously had their claim rejected. Those whose claims have failed in the EU know that if they can reach Britain they can make an entirely fresh claim and have a chance, possibly their last chance, of success. It is their last throw of the dice to succeed in obtaining refugee status, a throw they are likely to try even if they might be sent back if they fail.

It is not surprising that neither Farage nor the legacy Conservatives ever mention this. But, depressingly, it is also not surprising that the Labour government is very reluctant to talk about it either. Apart from a brave, possibly unauthorised mention by Angela Eagle in a different context, no Labour minister seems to have uttered the word “Eurodac”, the name of the EU’s database, in the House of Commons. It is not difficult to guess why Labour is so reticent. Labour is terrified of pro-Brexit ‘hero voters’ in the Red Wall and the rabid pro-Brexit newspapers and unwilling to contradict a BBC desperate to pretend that Brexit is a closed issue.

A Liberal alternative policy on small boats is that Britain should look to a European solution. It is, of course, very unlikely that Britain will be allowed access to the fingerprint data it needs without committing to adopt the rest of the EU’s asylum system, which involves sharing the burden of the refugee crisis across Europe in an equitable way, a system now about to take the new form of the Pact on Migration and Asylum.

But that is the point. Having control of your own border involves having influence over what happens on both sides of it. It is not enough, as British politicians should have learned by now, to make entry difficult on your own side of the border. You need to have some influence on the flow of people approaching the border from the other side. But that needs international cooperation and, realistically, that can only happen if countries agree to share the burden of helping genuine refugees and of distinguishing them from people merely trying to jump the queue for ordinary migration. That is precisely what the Pact seeks to achieve, and Britain should be willing to join it. Doing so will undermine the people smugglers’ business model as well has helping to reintegrate Britain into Europe.

Those obsessed with rejecting any form of international cooperation are being forced into more and more extreme policies. To generate a deterrent sufficient to take the place of international co-operation, the Conservatives invented the Rwanda scheme, which involved pretending that Rwanda, a country in whose detention centres, according to Human Rights Watch, torture is ‘pervasive’, was ‘safe’. Not to be outdone for snarling cruelty, Reform UK now proposes to threaten potential refugees with torture or death at the hands of the Taliban or the despotic regime in Iran, and all at British taxpayers’ expense.

But even that might not deter those for whom Britain is a last chance to gain refugee status. What other choice do they have? And so, although Reform UK has not quite expressed it yet, what it will eventually say is that it would not allow any asylum claims at all. That would amount to a complete withdrawal from international cooperation.

For Reform and the Conservatives’ morally short-sighted supporters, and increasingly for some Labour politicians, that is probably fine. But Liberals, as internationalists, know that countries that refuse to cooperate, that refuse to be bound by treaties, and that petulantly insist that they need no one else’s help about anything end up as distrusted, weaker and poorer. That fate now awaits the United States under Trump, but at least the USA is starting from a higher base. Britain starts lower and risks falling further.

Britain has a choice about what to do about the Channel crisis. We are not confined to various shades of nationalist authoritarianism, all offering different degrees of cruelty and isolation. A Liberal choice exists, one that involves cooperation with other countries and sharing burdens. Labour seems so frightened of its own voters that it dare not even admit that this choice exists. Liberals should be braver.