Does Labour want to stop the boats?
If evidence were needed of Labour’s disconnection from the concerns of most voters, it is in the party’s response to the small boats crisis. Thousands of migrants have crossed the Channel over the past 18 months. The country cannot continue to take in so many people claiming asylum when, in truth, their motives are often economic.
The immediate problem is where they should be housed, either while their cases are being considered or they are waiting to be removed to Rwanda, should that scheme ever get off the ground. To begin with, they were kept in a detention centre at Manston. But the former RAF base in Kent became so overcrowded that it was closed down. The only places immediately available were hotels and now some 50,000 migrants are being accommodated in this way at a cost of £6.2 million a day. Some 400 hotels have effectively been requisitioned, putting them off limits to their usual customers.
The Government wants to move the migrants to camps, though the three identified so far will not provide anywhere near enough places. Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, told MPs that ferries might also be used as accommodation. Labour’s Yvette Cooper maintained that speeding up processing is the answer, wilfully ignoring the fact that the sheer number of arrivals is what is slowing it down and failing to offer an alternative.
Furthermore, the very idea that, if you can get to Britain, a hotel room awaits is a perverse incentive to illegal migration. Mr Jenrick is adopting the only feasible approach but he has another problem, which is to convince Tory MPs to accept camps in their constituencies.
