The Observer view: ‘small boats week’ chaos reveals a bankrupt strategy | Observer editorial

The drowning on Saturday of at least six people after their vessel sank while trying to cross the Channel to reach Britain is a tragic reminder of how much is at stake, and for whom, in its waters. The most terrifying aspect of what has been dubbed the “small boats crisis” is the risk to life for people fleeing torture and conflict, many of whom will already have survived a traumatic and dangerous Mediterranean crossing.

For centuries, people have migrated to escape threats to human life. These movements have always been difficult to prevent in a world of naturally porous borders. Yet Rishi Sunak apparently believes he can achieve what others have not: stopping asylum seekers from crossing the Channel is one of his five key pledges ahead of the next election.

This has led the government to enact policies that are not just cruel but wholly unworkable, which will achieve nothing save signalling to the public that the government is anti-asylum. The Illegal Migration Act, passed last month, shreds the basic principles of international refugee law that Britain was instrumental in developing after the Second World War. It removes the right of anyone to apply for asylum and have their application treated on its own merits regardless of how they reached the UK. The legislation places a legal duty on the home secretary to deport anyone arriving through irregular means in the UK to seek asylum, regardless of whether their claim is legitimate. It also requires her never to grant that person permission to stay in the UK, and not to consider any asylum or protection claim they ever make in the future.

The act’s provisions mean that anyone having arrived in the UK through irregular routes after 20 July cannot have their asylum claim assessed, even if they are a victim of modern slavery. And the home secretary will have a legal duty to remove all those arriving after the bill passed “as soon as is reasonably practical”. The government’s stated hope is that removing the right of people to apply to the UK for asylum will deter people fleeing torture and conflict from coming to the UK.

But the Home Office’s own internal analysis – released under freedom of information law – is that this deterrent effect is unlikely to occur, because all the evidence suggests that it is the conditions in the countries people are fleeing that primarily drive their decision-making, and asylum seekers have very little knowledge of asylum policies and how they vary between destination countries. All that the government’s reforms will achieve is to create a growing underclass of tens and eventually hundreds of thousands of people whom the government is legally obliged to detain – at great cost to the taxpayer, and in flagrant breach of the dignity and human rights of asylum seekers – with nowhere to send them. The government’s intention to outsource its obligations to assess asylum claims to third countries in exchange for financial compensation has so far hit the rocks: the only third country it has negotiated a small-scale deal with is Rwanda, but that arrangement has so far been ruled unlawful by the British courts.

This government has been driven to look for further accommodation for asylum seekers – the overwhelming majority of whom are likely to have legitimate claims – as a product of its own decisions: because of the huge backlog in people waiting for claims to be assessed, and because its new policy will keep adding to this group. That is why it has turned to barges such as the Bibby Stockholm, launched last week during what it dubbed “small boats week”, despite being warned that the accommodation was unsafe. It shamefully continued to load people onboard even after being alerted to the presence of legionella. That the barge had to be evacuated so quickly is a depressing metaphor for the shambolic nature, as well as the inhumanity, of its reforms.

Politicians – both Conservative and Labour – should be levelling with the public about the difficulty of stopping people from trying to make the treacherous Channel crossing, and to put the number of asylum claims into context: the UK is home to a tiny fraction of the world’s refugees, receives far fewer asylum applications per head than the EU average, and well over three-quarters of applications are ultimately successful because most are people genuinely fleeing conflict and torture. The best thing the government could do would be to pledge to process applications swiftly so people can work and make an economic contribution to the UK, deport those who are refused and lead the call for international cooperation, including with our European allies.

Instead, Britain is leading the international race to the bottom on refugee policy in a world in which the EU – while not pursuing policies as extreme as the UK – is focusing on deterrence, detention and return rather than a fair distribution of asylum applications across its member states. Global instability and the climate crisis mean that irregular migration will only increase in the coming decades. The more countries that bury their head in the sand, the greater the security risk this will create. But, from asylum policy to the costs of achieving net zero, stoking division where politicians should be trying to have an honest conversation about big global challenges appears to be the Conservative strategy to try to win the next election. It is the very opposite of the honest, grownup politics that voters deserve.