WHY THE UK BORDER SECURITY COMMAND WON'T STOP THE BOATS, WHY NIGEL FARAGE IS WRONG - WE MUST GO AFTER THE GANGS
Labour’s plans for stopping the boats will not work.
Likewise, Nigel Farage is wrong to say that going after the gangs won’t work.
As I’ve said all along, there’s no silver bullet to solving the problem of boats and economic migrants crossing the Channel. But let’s look at what will reduce the flow and, in doing so, show why Labour’s plans won’t work and why Nigel has this wrong.
THREE DIMENSIONS
There are three dimensions that must be tackled simultaneously.
First… The push factors: in other words, why people decide to leave their countries and regions of origin.
Second… The encouragement and facilitation of their movement when they do decide to move. This includes people smugglers marketing the opportunity to move. It includes corrupt border guards and officials… many things provide migrants with the idea, opportunity and means to move and they must all be tackled.
And then there are the pull factors… the reasons people want to come here to the UK… in other words, why the UK is attractive to them.
The pull factors include benefits, accommodation, access to the legal and the illegal jobs market, ease of sending remittances – money – back to their home countries, the presence of well-established and supportive communities from their own countries and cultures here in the UK, and the fact that they are highly unlikely to be removed or deported.
On this last point, the Labour government has absolutely no plan, as yet, as to what to do with failed asylum seekers from countries such as Iran, Afghanistan and Syria – people who we can’t return easily because we have no diplomatic or logistical connection with their countries. It was those people that the Conservative government wanted to send to Rwanda.
APPLICATION OF FILTERS
All three of these dimensions – the push factors, the movement and the pull factors – must all be dealt with simultaneously or success will evade us.
Think of it in this way, our response must be to create a series of filters. No one filter will achieve the desired effect alone, but if they’re all applied together, each will have a partial influence and contribute to a collective impact on the problem.