Three-pronged problem of ‘small boats’ cannot be solved by law alone

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Good morning. Rishi Sunak is fresh from solving one Tory problem (sort of) with the Windsor framework. Can the same approach solve another in the shape of the small boats issue? Some thoughts on that in today’s note.

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Rishi Sunak’s big diplomatic victory last week mattered for a lot of reasons. Jude Webber and Daniel Thomas have detailed the most important one of all: its implications for Northern Ireland’s businesses and the lives of people in the region.

I discussed some of the political benefits last week. But it has also validated (at least in the prime minister’s own mind) the method by which he conducts himself and runs Downing Street. As George Parker explains in a superb mini-profile of Sunak, he loves to be across the detail. That can sometimes annoy his colleagues. (One ally recently complained to me that “only someone that polite could get away with being that much of a micromanager”.)

Sunak got deep into the minutiae of the Northern Ireland protocol, and the reward — in his eyes — was the Windsor framework. Now he hopes that maintaining this approach to set tasks will help him fix another problem that vexes Conservatives: people arriving illegally in the UK via small boats.

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The plan is to pass another law barring anyone arriving in the UK by small boats from claiming asylum. Once removed, they will be “permanently” banned from returning. Under the Nationality and Borders Act passed by parliament last year, people who arrive in the UK without prior permission and who “could have claimed asylum in another safe country” are already seen as “inadmissible” for asylum.

The latter set of legislation was drafted and made into law when Priti Patel was home secretary and Boris Johnson was prime minister — two politicians who cannot be described being details orientated. So it’s certainly possible that new legislation under Sunak’s cautious eye will be more effective.

But not all that likely, I think. The Conservative party’s “small boats problem” is in three parts: the basic geographic fact that the UK is not that far away from the European mainland, there are very few legal routes for people who wish to seek asylum in the UK, and, as anyone who has received a spam text would tell you, Britain is a pretty welcoming environment for criminal activity at the moment. If you do not have legal routes, and both geography and your own state capacity make it fairly easy to set up illegal routes, there is only so much that new legislation can do to solve the problem.

Part of the challenge is that many of the workable policy solutions, while popular in the country as a whole, do not unite the Conservative party as a whole. Spending more on policing means getting further away from the tax cuts that many in the Conservative party sincerely want, and almost everyone in the party feels obliged to pretend to want. There are many opponents of ID cards on the Conservative backbenches.

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So if not this legislation, what? That’s the political problem that Sunak will need all of his attention to detail and all of his courtesy to fix.