As CapX fan favourite Karl Marx once said: ‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.’ This may be one of the only correct statements ever uttered by that awful little man, but it really has proven true this week as Labour’s latest attempts to ‘stop the boats’ have run aground.
This week, an Eritrean man who entered Britain illegally on a small boat has successfully avoided being deported to France under the ‘one in, one out*’ scheme named presumably by Labour’s Department for Kafkaesque Absurdist Names. This follows two others who also avoided being deported on flights after a barrage of campaigning and intimidation from so-called charities and NGOs. It didn’t however, prevent lobby journalists from taking off on those flights to France, which must count as something of a win.
All of this was totally predictable; in fact it was predicted. It is less than two years since Robert Jenrick resigned from the Conservative government in protest at the lack of muscle that Rishi Sunak was willing to flex on the small boats crisis. Such a pity that Starmer clearly did not read Jenrick’s brave and principled resignation letter. If he had, he may have entered Downing Street with a much clearer sense of the challenges he would face, especially over the power of this so-called ‘blob’ and its ability to stymie almost every government action.
It’s worth quoting that letter at some length to remind us that this is an increasingly chronic problem:
One of the great advantages of our unwritten constitution is the unfettered power of our sovereign parliament to create law, and that is a power we must take full advantage of. The government has a responsibility to place our vital national interests above highly contested interpretations of international law…
The stakes for the country are too high for us not to pursue the stronger protections required to end the merry-go-round of legal challenges which risk paralysing the scheme and negating its intended deterrent…
This emergency legislation is the last opportunity to prove this, but in its current drafting it does not go far enough.
We have now tried four different styles of premiership in the time that small boats have been an issue: Theresa May’s Home Office-detailed focus, Boris Johnson’s cult of personality, Rishi Sunak’s superhuman work ethic and now Starmer having been deeply marinaded in the blob itself. None have worked. The problem is much deeper. Exactly as Jenrick said, it is now existential to use parliamentary supremacy to overrule all judicial activity in this matter (and much else besides), as well as all the disruption from the charities, NGOs and ECHR-fuelled lawyers.
This most recent example is just as Marx said, farcical. Melisa Tourt at the Centre for Policy Studies brilliantly listed just how vanilla this case has been. She tweeted:
– we take another refugee in return
– we’re sending 1 guy when 700+ came last week
– his claim was made inadmissible
– he’s an adult man
– he’s literally just going to France
And we still can’t do it.
To avoid seeming heartless, it’s true that Eritrea is objectively one of the worst places on Earth. It has been run by a Marxist dictator, trained by the CCP since the 1960s, ever since it broke free of Ethiopia in the 1990s. It has abysmal standards of life, and little hope. And there is a horrendous form of military conscription that is not time-limited, and turns ‘soldiers’ onto large civil infrastructure projects. It is this which likely forms the backbone of many complaints by the activist lawyers who work on behalf of these illegal immigrants.
But if it is impossible to send one Eritrean back to France, let alone East Africa, and it sounds and seems as though it now clearly is, then our courts are essentially saying that every Eritrean, millions of them, can stay in Britain indefinitely if only they make it here. Let alone the countless millions more from other unpleasant places. This is not sustainable, and yet it continues.
If we don’t remove the blob completely, then this existential issue will drag Britain as we know it below the waterline. And this would be both a farce, and a tragedy.
*Currently 8,000 in, one out.
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