IT’s deeply troubling that the fate of 101 Dalmatians is more affecting than the plight of migrants to the UK. Any viewer of Disney’s original animation could not help but be moved by Suella de Vil’s plans to make fur coats out of Perdita and Pongo’s puppy progeny.
As a furred mammal with claws and fangs, Badger dares Suella to come after him.
Contrariwise, when it comes to real human beings as opposed to animated pooches, Cruella Braverman gets a hearty round of applause from the Dementors on the Conservative back benches and the usual online arm lifters.
In his wildest and most vivid nightmares, Badger never dreamt he would one day see a Home Secretary of Asian descent using the same vile rhetorical tropes recited by the National Front in the 1970s and its inheritors in hatred, the BNP and Britain First.
Now you get two in quick succession.
That, Badger supposes, is progress of a sort.
Britain has moved so far along the spectrum of equal opportunities and multicultural integration that second-generation immigrants can use vile and racist rhetoric with the proficiency of Anglo-Saxons. Makes the heart swell with pride, doesn’t it, readers?
And, of course, immigration wouldn’t be a “problem” if it wasn’t for those clowns who’ve been in government for the last dozen years or so.
Remember the years before the Brexit referendum, readers? In 2010, the last year Labour held power, the number of asylum applications was 17,000.
In 2016, the number of asylum applications fell from 33,000 to 30,000. In 2021, the number of asylum applications was 49,000. In the year to this June, the number of asylum applications was around 63,000.
Of those 63,000 – as in previous years – the overwhelming majority of applicants came from countries torn asunder by conflict, occasionally conflict in which the UK had a role.
The figure is 77% more than in 2019 and the highest number for almost two decades. It is higher than at the peak of the European migration crisis (when in the year ending June 2016, there were 36,546 applications). It is, however, around three-quarters of the previous peak in asylum applications in 2002 (84,000 applications), partly driven by conflict and political unrest in countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, and Somalia. Twenty years on, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and Syria appear on the list of countries providing the most migrants claiming asylum.
It’s amazing what a healer time is, readers.
Sue-Ellen Braverman (for such is her real name, and she was named after the Dallas character) is mightily exercised about the number of small boats crossing the English Channel and depositing cargoes of human misery in sight of Dover’s whiter-than-white cliffs.
Between January 2018 and June 2022, there were 50,297 small boat arrivals, of whom 94% applied for asylum (47,306) and 91% as main applicants (43,066). Between January and June this year, the UK Border Force detected 12,747 people arriving by small boats from January to June 2022. That figure more than doubles the number in the same six months in 2021 (5,917). There were 28,526 people detected arriving on small boats in 2021, compared with 8,466 in 2020, 1,843 in 2019 and 299 in 2018.
Badger can’t put his finger on it. Still, he’s pretty sure that efforts to stem the number of immigrants to this country were very important in 2016 for one reason or another. You’d think pulling out of a convention and agreements making it easier to return migrants to third countries for processing their claims would have zero effect on the number of people trying to enter the UK through irregular means. It’s enough to make the idle observer wonder what’s happened that year to drive up the number of those entering the country by Channel crossings.
That’s clearly what the UK Government must’ve thought. We took back control of our borders. The figures speak for themselves.
And before Brexit supporters get all huffy, self-righteous, and start bandying around their usual insults and venom, Badger’s not blaming Brexit for the whole issue. He is, however, saying it’s a significant contributor. Once you’ve pulled out of a common framework for law enforcement and border control and lost access to intelligence gathered overseas, the inevitable outcome is to reduce the efficiency of border controls and the effectiveness of their enforcement.
The French Government offered to process claims in France, by the way. The far-sighted UK Government, terrified of entering into an agreement with Johnny Foreigner (especially the cheese-eating surrender monkeys), refused to countenance anything that might suggest an end to the glorious solitary confinement conferred by Brexit.
As Badger observed last week, when the twelve monkeys of the ERG got the keys to the banana plantation, you’d expect nothing less than hysterical ideological purity driving out common sense and chaos. And that’s exactly what the UK got. It’s what 17.4m human beings and Jacob Rees Mogg voted for. At least Suella de Vil is a lawyer and knows that breaking international law… oh, sorry.
The real scandal is that cutting public services has had an inevitable effect on the capacity of the UK’s ability to cope with asylum applications. Claims for new technology have proven to be so much piss in the wind, and we don’t have a large enough navy to patrol the world’s busiest shipping lane. There are not enough trained immigration officers, and the UK is bewilderingly under-prepared to secure its borders.
The failure of our immigration system is our problem to sort out, nobody else’s. Of all asylum claims made between 2018 and 2021, over 100,000 are yet to be processed as far as an initial decision. That’s a chronic lack of capacity, combined with a failure of forward planning and the triumph of striking poses over real action. Suppose the UK Government is serious about tackling the issue of irregular entries to the UK. In that case, it needs to devote real time and resources to doing so.
Under Labour, we began closing legal routes for those wanting to claim asylum. Our policies are driving irregular entries to the UK. We must sort it out.
It’s far better to act than for the Home Secretary to incontinently spout words that belong only in the mouths of scum like Tommy Robinson and his neo-Nazi (“I-eat-kebabs-and-know-a black-person, so-I-can’t-be-racist”) marks and hangers-on. All the bonkers – outrageous, arm-lifting, nativist, insane, offensive, crass, ignorant – conspiracy theories about why that is the case are born out of malice and con tricks.
Looking back at the roll call of Home Secretaries since 1997, Badger is not surprised we are where we are. The overwhelming majority of them are political non-entities and no-marks.
There’s only one answer.
It’s time to rip up the Home Office, end the posing, and start again.
