In this year alone 58 people and counting have lost their lives trying to cross the Channel in small boats. Some of them have drowned; some are children crushed to death by other panicking, desperate asylum seekers. The scale of fear, misery and despair is impossible to comprehend.
This week, Keir Starmer put some of this unspeakable tragedy at the door of Brexit. Asked at an Interpol conference in Glasgow whether Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal with the EU had hampered the UK’s efforts to stop the people traffickers, he replied: “I do think when it comes to security, we can do better than the deal we’ve got and that’s what we’re pursuing. I don’t think the deal we got was a particularly good one. That’s why we want to improve on it.”
Starmer wants a new deal that will once again give Britain access to Eurodac, a large-scale database which contains the fingerprints of all those who apply for asylum in the EU27. This, he hopes, will allow Britain to quickly remove any new arrivals who have already had an asylum claim rejected by an EU country.
He also hopes a better EU deal will once again allow Britain to play a leading role in Europe-wide efforts to tackle the people-smuggling gangs. “When we were in the EU, we could lead on operations, and at the moment we can’t,” Starmer said.
It seems a logical path in a world of illogic. Rwanda could never have worked, turning back or even sinking boats is a dangerous fantasy and expecting police patrols to stop all or even most crossings seems unlikely.
But it’s worth stepping back to ask why all this is even necessary in the first place.
When looking for the cause of a current major problem in the UK it is usually useful to just assume that it is all the fault of Boris Johnson, unless proven otherwise. In this case, that proves to be a useful rule of thumb.
There were no small boats crossings before Brexit – not a single recorded case, apparently, but once the UK started to leave the EU they took off at an exponential rate. One thing that stopped people risking their lives to get to the UK in the past was membership of the EU and specifically the “returns policy” that existed before Brexit. This meant migrants who entered Britain without authorisation could be returned to the first safe EU country they had entered.
Under that deal there was no point in risking your life to get to the UK because you’d be sent straight back. But Mr Johnson failed to negotiate a continuation of the returns policy.
As Professor Thom Brooks of Durham University put it in his research paper on this subject last year, “The main factor is the Government’s failure to negotiate a post-Brexit returns policy with the European Union: Brexit is not to blame, but the government’s Brexit deal is”.
Which helps explain all that guff about Rwanda, painting over cartoon character murals and leaving the ECHR – it was all a desperate and very nasty attempt to stop the small boats by being bastards, because the Tories couldn’t admit it was all their own fault in the first place.
But will Sir Keir’s plan work any better? New security pacts with database access are nice, but they are not a returns policy. Labour has yet to learn that if it wants to solve the messes it has inherited that are caused by Brexit, fiddling at the edges is not the answer.
Boris Johnson’s inept and callous deal was the sole reason for the small boats’ crisis. It is costing numerous lives in the Channel, children and babies are drowning.
If that doesn’t give you the strength and political will to take on the Brexit nutters and start serious cooperation with the EU, what will?
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