The Opposition reportedly plan to fund a new task force with the savings from clearing the asylum backlog and ending the use of hotels. But both of those things would cost a lot of money to achieve – unless the plan is to just wave people through.
The Shadow Home Secretary lacks the tabloid news sense needed to decide which of the Government’s many failings to highlight.
Whilst the clergy can’t wash their hands of their role in appearing to facilitate “industrial scale” conversion to game the system, it is the Government that sets the rules of the game.
Excluding many young pro-democracy activists, coupled with the prolonged waiting period for asylum seekers, paints a grim picture of incompetence and ignorance by officials overseeing the process.
Moreover, how to do so without confronting any hard trade-offs or admitting any fundamental shortcomings with the UK’s economic model after 13 years of the party being in government.
Without understanding what parts of the status quo are propped up by the mass import of people, and how, and why, any move to cut headline numbers is going to run aground on the consequences of so doing.
What communities need from their police forces would be out in favour of top-down targets and threats of further action from the centre if chiefs don’t perform to the Labour mandate.
The Prime Minister’s mooted emergency legislation seems unlikely to pass; even if it did, there is hardly time before the next election to get the policy operational.
This is not something that needs to be buried in any arcana about the Ministerial Code. Rishi Sunak does not need an inquiry to tell him whether he asked for changes to Suella Braverman’s article or not.
A crackdown on people evading a properly-funded shelter system might be fair – but only if that system exists. So if the Government is going to deliver it, why not focus on that significant, positive achievement?
The current minimal-confrontation approach too often seems to leave officers tacitly enforcing the codes of the ugliest and most violent sections of society.
Well-founded concerns about the suitability of post-war international agreements to modern global conditions are not strengthened by being lumped together with attacks on multiculturalism.
Armed officers and soldiers obviously cannot have carte blanche to shoot as they please; but there must be some allowance for the impossibility of always getting every split-second judgement right.
Instead of a Conservative housing policy that emphasises home ownership and architectural beauty, it will now be done the Labour way. When tower blocks start rising over the Home Counties, I hope that our remaining MPs realise their mistake.
Research by the Refugee Council finds that, far from acting as a deterrent, the Rwanda plan is likely to result in people taking journeys that are even more dangerous and will drive vulnerable people underground.