Politicians must listen to the people on immigration – or face their red-hot fury

One of my first visits as immigration minster was to a family in Dover.

Their home had just been broken into by a small boat arrival. It was a portent of the damage illegal migration is doing to this country that would confront me every day in my position.

A day later, I was summoned to the Commons to explain why hundreds of hotels were being taken over to house these illegal arrivals.

There was, of course, no defence I could offer for this farcical situation, nor any immediate solution, with my hands tied by primary domestic legislation and the European Convention on Human Rights for these illegal arrivals to be housed.

Soon after, I was working with the MP in Knowsley dealing with the aftermath of a riot in a deprived area of Merseyside, where trouble surrounding an asylum hotel had led to communal violence on the streets.

If former home secretary Sajid Javid declared a “major incident” when 250 arrivals crossed between January and November in 2018, five years on – and 114,000 illegal arrivals later – when I walked into the beleaguered Home Office it was clear that the illegal, dangerous and completely unnecessary crossings had pushed the UK beyond breaking point.

The Prime Minister was right, therefore, to promise to do whatever it takes to end this farce.

And, until Wednesday, he had kept his word. While the legality of the Rwanda policy was winding its way through our courts, we did everything else we could, striking a deal with Albania , increasing returns of immigration offenders and cracking down on illegal working.

The result has been a 30 per cent decrease in arrivals compared with last year and the closures of asylum hotels. That is progress, but far from enough.

The bleak reality is that there is every reason to suggest the outlook is deteriorating.

There was a 30 per cent increase of illegal arrivals into the borderless Schengen area this year, geopolitical turmoil in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa will further stoke migratory patterns, and there remains more than 100 million individuals displaced worldwide.

So long as the EU cannot police its borders, the UK will be forced to grapple with the injustice of illegal migration.

Meanwhile, the ruse the open-border enthusiasts in the Labour Party are attempting to sell the country is that you can arrest your way out of this problem.

Their suggestion that an additional cross-border cell of officers can solve one of the great challenges of the 21st century would be laughable if it wasn’t such a serious matter.

To actually stop the boats requires establishing the strongest possible deterrent to those thinking about making the journey.

The Rwanda policy is the only credible deterrent we can implement to achieve that effect this side of a general election.

Following the signing of the treaty between the UK and Rwanda that directly responds to the Supreme Court’s concerns, our ability to implement the policy now rests on the passage of effective legislation.

Legislation must address the Supreme Court’s judgment that Rwanda may subsequently remove people to countries that are not safe. And it must block off inevitable further systemic and individual legal challenges that would otherwise prevent flights from taking off.

The Prime Minister is right to say the Bill goes further than ever before. But the test for the legislation isn’t where it ranks in the many Bills the Conservative Party have introduced over the past few years.

The test is: will it work? Will it end the merry-go-round of legal challenges that prevent small boat arrivals being swiftly removed in sufficient numbers to create a meaningful deterrent?

Having done as much as I could to strengthen the legislation I concluded, regrettably, the answer is no. It was therefore clear I could not continue, in good faith, in my position as the Bill’s minister.

By allowing individuals to make claims that their circumstances mean they cannot be sent to Rwanda, the Bill invites each small boat arrival to concoct a reason to delay their removal.

The small boat-chasing law firms will gladly assist them in this endeavour, and the smuggling gangs will quickly produce a well-tested narrative for their customers to deploy upon arrival.

The Supreme Court’s judgment , which criticised Rwanda heavily – and in many respects unnecessarily – means judges will be far more receptive to their personal claims, thereby compounding the risk that individuals are taken off flights in considerable number.

This is not merely my opinion. It is also the careful judgement of some of the country’s finest legal minds.

But these claims needn’t ultimately be successful to undermine the scheme. The ability for every illegal arrival to lodge a personal claim will place the courts under immense pressure. Backlogs will likely build, and cases that would at best take months to resolve will be stayed considerably longer.

Injunctions will likely follow. And we will begin losing bail claims, forcing us to release people from detention. People will of course abscond and disappear into communities.

Even on an optimistic assessment, it will still take a protracted period for an individual to be removed following their illegal entry. Because of our limited detention capacity, this will severely limit our ability to detain all arrivals crossing illegally.

A busy day of crossings will take our ability to detain anyone else who comes across subsequently offline. The idea, therefore, that this Bill will guarantee all those arriving are detained and swiftly removed is for the birds.

The only Bill capable of delivering that is a Bill that guarantees removal within days, not months, of arrival by blocking off individual challenges that would otherwise prevent that.

Another core concern that I have is that, despite the rhetoric suggesting otherwise, the Bill does not exclude interim rulings of the sort that grounded our first attempted Rwanda flight from the European Court of Human Rights.

Again, given the loss in the Supreme Court, the likelihood of such rulings increases significantly.

The new Bill replicates the provisions under the section 55 of the Illegal Migration Act, which enables ministers to use their “discretion”, but in practice I know the instances this will be used is vanishingly rare, if ever.

It would be unforgivable for the Government to find itself, after two Acts of Parliament, derailed by the exact same issue that grounded flights over a year ago.

As Richard Ekins, a leading lawyer, set out in a recent Policy Exchange report, the ability to issue a rule 39 indication is a power the Strasbourg court has awarded itself and was never something the UK agreed to when it signed up to the convention.

It is only the shifting and undemocratic concept of “customary” international law that has afforded it any status until now. The Bill must therefore, in clear statutory language, preclude rule 39 indicators from preventing removals. Having promised to do whatever it takes to stop the boats , the goal now seems to have been reduced to delivering some symbolic, half-filled flights, taking off in the spring of next year.

Clearly for the policy to work we need individuals removed at scale, and within days of illegally stepping on to our shores. Anything less than this and the boats will keep coming. Controlling our borders would, of course, be far more straightforward if we extricated ourselves from the complex web of international frameworks that have taken on near mythical status within Government.

These treaties were designed for a different world and have since been stretched beyond their intention. It will only become painfully more apparent that these outdated treaties cannot be renegotiated any time soon, so they must give way.

One of the great advantages of our uncodified constitution is the unfettered power of our sovereign Parliament to create law, and that is a power we should not be afraid to take advantage of. Whilst Westminster consumes itself with debates on stopping the boats in the coming weeks – which accounts for less than 10 per cent of overall migration to the UK – legal migration remains at historically unprecedented levels.

Yet the arguments advanced by the Government about why we must stop the boats – severe community cohesion challenges, pressure on public services and housing challenges – self-evidently apply far more strongly to legal migration, but have received a fraction of the attention.GP services and hospitals do not grow on trees. Integration is impossible if you let in over 1.2 million new people as we have done over the last two years. Business investment and productivity will continue to be sluggish if companies retain their dependency on cheap foreign labour.

As a recent Centre for Policy Studies report revealed, we need to build at least 515,000 homes in England each year to keep pace with this level of net migration – and until we do the housing crisis will only worsen.

These are all facts the public feel acutely in their day-to-day lives, which is why reducing net migration amongst virtually every voting group has such salience.

Despite the significant improvements announced to raise the minimum salary threshold and restrict the number of dependants, the Government still remains a considerable way off meeting its 2019 manifesto commitment to reduce net migration from 2019 levels, and to reshape our economy to a high-wage, high-investment model – one that prizes GDP per capita, not just GDP.

The reforms I secured need to be implemented immediately via an emergency rules change to prevent a fire sale of visa applications and must be accompanied by further significant measures in the new year.

For starters, the graduate route is ripe for comprehensive reform. Too many universities have fallen into the migration, rather than education, business, and are marketing low-grade, short courses as a back-door to a life in the UK.

Post-Brexit, we finally have the levers at our disposal to deliver on the promises politicians have successively made the British public to reduce net migration radically.

The resistance we now encounter is the political preference for the short-term expediency of cheap labour, an outdated orthodoxy on the economic benefits of immigration pushed by the OBR, and flawed assumptions about the social and cultural benefits of mass immigration peddled by people insulated from the trade-offs.

There is no better example of the failed Westminster consensus over the last 30 years than the historically unprecedented levels of immigration that have been forced on voters against their wish. As we are seeing in election after election across Europe, immigration will be a defining issue of 21st century politics. The public’s patience has already snapped.

Centre-Right parties across Europe have a choice: begin to deliver on the mainstream concerns of ordinary people when it comes to immigration, or face their red-hot fury at the ballot box.