“Right now, the ‘Eye of Sauron’ isn’t on us”
I used this Lord of the Rings reference a lot in Government. It described those brief moments where media attention was not focused on our every move. There were precious few.
However, the new Home Secretary is in just such a scrutiny gap as the lidless eyes of journalists focus intently on the Chancellor and her budget. You know, the one that won’t tax working people – just people who work – or something.
Yvette Cooper may have hoped to use this time to progress her immigration plans – such as they are. Thankfully a few eagle-eyed observers have spotted she’s quietly making all the mistakes we said they would.
It’s wearying to say ‘we told you so’, and doing so would deny it’s the Conservative’s own fault nobody was listening when we did.
Some would say it also dodges the claim the last Government did nothing on immigration. I’ll take that head on – it’s not true. It went up dramatically in 2021-22. It was tackled head on in 2023.
This time last year the Conservative Government announced measures to cut legal migration by hundreds of thousands. Not only did those measures work but they are still working. No doubt the current Government will claim undeserved credit for this, because they did for most of the investment at their Investment summit.
‘Stop the boats’ was the problem.
Rishi Sunak promised we would, and we didn’t. No getting away from it – but if you remotely believe Labour will, then I have some magic beans to sell you.
When we said they had no plan for tackling illegal migration – officials prefer to call it ‘irregular’ migration – we were right. Labour’s public plan was to scrap our deterrent but not have one themselves and try and replicate some bits of what we were doing and hope it would work.
They attacked Rwanda as if it was all we were doing. That’s despite two years of relentless UK focus on smashing the gangs. Instead, they talked as if they’d invented a new plan called – amazingly – smashing the gangs.
They made it sound easy and grown up and called our deterrent a ‘gimmick’. The actual gimmick was to claim they’d build a new unit to tackle smuggling gangs and use all the forces of the state to do it. It was a mirage.
As with so many of Labours’ pre-election promises the trick was to pretend this was creative thinking from a government in waiting. The problem was – and still is – that their new Border Security Command already existed.
The Small Boats Operational Command was headed by an extremely competent former general and every day for its existence did stop thousands of people crossing in small boats. It just didn’t stop them all. That we should fully accept. Stopping them all was the target, and it was not reached.
After a lot longer than the new Government had hoped, Yvette Cooper has announced just one appointment to this new body. The Border Security Commander. A former head of the Police Chief’s Council, Martin Hewitt.
One of his first and important acts was to declare the new ‘smash the gangs’ policy would only work with a deterrent. Just what the Conservatives had been saying. Just what Labour scrapped on day one.
I completely reject the claim that Rwanda, the Conservative deterrent policy, was never going to work. Had we not had the election when we did, a plane would have left the UK on 26 June this year, followed by another, and another and so on.
True the numbers would not have been large in 2024, but that was never the point and Labour knew it. As the Albania deal had shown, you prove you will send some people, and suddenly others don’t try to cross. It really is as simple as that. Alongside targeting boats, engines, money flows and criminals, it works.
Even in the run up to the first flight the deterrent effect was obvious, and Labour were terrified by it. Asylum seekers went to Dublin and told anyone happy to listen the reason they’d left the UK was because they ‘didn’t want to go to Rwanda.’
Oh, and before anyone starts, Rwanda is where the UN process asylum seekers and is a remarkable country that truly understands refugees. Kigali got broadband before Dorset did, so let’s row back the whole backward African country nastiness that infected the anti-campaign.
Labours biggest mistake has always been to believe anyone who arrives here on a small boat, or inside a lorry (from a safe country) is a genuine refugee.
Not all of them are, and it’s utterly absurd to try and pretend otherwise.
Labour never did answer a question Rishi Sunak asked in the pre-election debates:
“Where will you send people who are here illegally and don’t qualify for asylum? Will you make returns agreements with Assad, the Taliban, or Tehran?”
They still haven’t answered but they know the answer. They won’t, they’ll be forced by their own policy to let them stay.
Whilst whining about the costs of a deterrent, they have closed the Bibi Stockholm, scrapped plans for the Scampton site and, now we learn, despite their manifesto promise, they are desperately looking for hotels to house the growing numbers still coming across.
They have either deliberately, or worse accidentally, embraced an annual cost for housing asylum seekers in the UK projected to be £11billion a year by 2026. All whilst complaining of a £22billion black hole in the finances. They keep digging.
This dwarfs the cost of Rwanda, the only real deterrent any party has ever put on the table. That no flight occurred is just another tragic fall out of the ‘unexpected’ election.
And just this week, if the new Prime Minister’s hypocrisy count was not high enough, he upped it again. When asked at PMQs by the leader of the opposition – a man he insists on calling the Prime Minister – about the threat of China to free speech in universities, his response was to accuse Rishi Sunak of scoring “party political points” on issues of national security.
He then sanctimoniously claimed this was something Labour had not done in opposition.
I nearly choked on my tea.
To my knowledge nobody asked MI5 if they were happy about being brought into the ultimate political point scoring of an election campaign when it came to Labour’s new – but old – “smash the gangs” policy. Starmer and Cooper repeated that claim over and over again.
MI5 rightly stay very quiet about their work.
It was for the last Government to point out their people were already very busy protecting us from espionage, terrorism and state threats, never mind criminal gangs – who are in fact covered by the National Crime Agency – who do a good job of it.
A recent and rare speech by Ken McCallum the head of the Security Services did not mention work on smuggling gangs. Instead, he listed how busy they are on their existing threats.
“It will be clear to you that MI5 has one hell of a job on its hands.” he told his audience.
The beauty for Labour of claiming MI5 will tackle gangs is it will never be confirmed or denied – unless of course the PM decides to do some political point scoring with national security.
So, when the boats keep coming, and they house more people and open hotels, and despite claiming returns agreements are easy, the numbers being deported are not higher, keep a careful eye on our Home Secretary.
She’s desperately hoping that this will still go unnoticed, right up until the ‘Eye of Sauron’ spots its obvious expensive flaws.
