To save lives, fight the far right, and restore fairness to migration, we must reform our asylum system.
A version of this article appeared on ConservativeHome.
I recently joined a small volunteer group in my constituency, the Furness Multicultural Forum, for what was a very affecting meeting. Alongside them were about 20 of the 70-odd asylum seekers currently residing in a hotel in Barrow-in-Furness. I listened to their stories and was left moved.
In Parliament I sit on the Home Affairs Committee. We’ve just completed an enquiry into the asylum system, looking at everything from the small boats that cross our channel, to the backlogs that the Home Office are sat on at present. It’s woeful, and people are right to be sick of it. But it’s very easy to forget the people living it.
Some facts first. Not a single person crosses the channel without the aid of a criminal gang. Some are fleeing genocide. Others have been sold into slavery, bonded into work long before they reach the UK. Many are making a choice about their future and where - due to language, culture, or history - they want to spend their lives. What is clear is that there is no ‘one size fits all’ asylum seeker on those small boats.
One of the gentlemen I met in Barrow worked for more than a decade with the UK and the US in Helmand Province in Afghanistan. When the Taliban rolled through Afghanistan, he knew he had a target on his back and left his wife and children behind, fleeing to the UK for safety. Had he been in Kabul instead of Helmand, there is every chance we would have airlifted him here direct during those desperate last days of OP PITTING.
Many others have similar stories, having fled war, and persecution. They’ve come here and asked for asylum. And to their surprise, the nature of our creaking asylum system means that they’ve ended up in circling their future in Barrow, or towns very much like it across the UK.
Amongst the group I met were people skilled in aircraft maintenance, chemical engineers, chefs, sustainable energy experts, and folk holding multiple doctorates. These people are hungry to work, earn, and to give back, but they can’t because of the rules that our asylum system means they have to live under. Instead, groups like the Multicultural Forum find them volunteering opportunities - doing gardening and other small projects.
One gentleman I spoke to came to the UK optimistic. He speaks good English and has excellent qualifications. He told me that he now doesn’t care if the Home Office orders him to leave - he’s spent 18 months in limbo and will happily claim asylum in another country, rather than continue the slow atrophy of his body and mind here in England. But irony or ironies, the limbo he is in prevents him from even doing that.
You can hate the system, and how the people I spoke to got to the UK. But it is ridiculous that we don’t harness the skills of people who have got here, have much needed skills and qualifications, and want to work, earn and pay tax.
The backlogs in processing asylum claims have gummed up the whole system. As a result, legal routes to asylum are all but broken. And so the volume of small boat crossings increases to compensate, further pressurising the system. It is an in-virtuous circle, with the creaking legal system broken by the illegal one. One result of this is that we end up with folk from Syria and Afghanistan wasting away in Barrow.
This broken system has other consequences too. One gentleman I met was sporting a cast on his arm - he had been beaten up one night, and had his wrist broken. Others reported being followed, threatened, and racially abused. Afraid, many of them now won’t even leave the hotel they are housed in, remaining in their rooms for days on end.
We have created a powder-keg. Import a few dozen dark-skinned people into a 98% white British community that is about as far away from anywhere else in the UK as possible (The Furness peninsula is locally described as ‘the longest cul-de-sac in England’), and you can see where the problems might start to arise.
This manifests in far-right activism. One group, Patriotic Alternative, is now particularly active in my community - putting vile leaflets through doors, and employing emotive language, such as ‘fighting age males.’
My local paper - the North West Evening Mail - uncovered the chats Patriotic Alternative members held about protests in the community. They claim to be speaking for common folk, but yet their avatars on the messaging platform Telegram feature swastikas, their founder is a Nazi sympathiser, and The Times reports that the Home Office is considering proscribing their organisation. In not fixing the system we have gifted fertile ground for them to take root.
Any immigration system must be predicated on control. That’s what Brexit was about. We must be able to choose who we want to accept here - whether on compassionate grounds, or because we want them bringing skills and contributing to society. But we’re not going to get there without closing down illegal routes - stopping the small boats and, as we do so, opening up legal ones.
Ramping up the rhetoric will simply not deliver that. There’s no easy solution, and anyone who tells you there is, is lying to you.
Partnership is the only way to do it. We need a rigorous agreement with France, and the EU, on managing migrant flows and stopping small boats. It will require compromise, but we are out of election cycles in France and the UK right now and so a window exists to achieve more. To that end, I was delighted to see that on the fringes of the recent European Political Community meeting in Prague, the PM and President Macron of France agreed to step up co-operation to do just this.
It’s not too much to ask for a system that works and is fair. One that makes quick decisions and allows us, as a host country, to be generous to those in need, and to choose who we want here. And one that doesn’t stoke up anger at the scenes playing out in Dover, and in our communities, as we deal with the consequences of that system.
Getting to that point is going to be tough, but the effort will be worth it: for gentlemen like those I met in Barrow; for our economy and public services; in taking the only stick they have from the far right, and - dare I say it - politically too.
