With a UK backlog of over 74,000 asylum applications still awaiting consideration, the much-publicised attempt to house up to 500 people on a barge, the Bibby Stockholm, in Portland, Dorset, is no panacea to the challenge of accommodating the desperate migrants crossing the Channel in droves. Two more barges and three army camps are also being considered for emergency accommodation – sticking plaster measures all about ministers appearing tough on migration and disregarding the reality that, as the Refugee Council points out, some three-quarters of applications for refugee status are eventually deemed valid and granted.
Channel crossing numbers are down slightly, but 15,000 have crossed “illegally” already this year, with the cost of accommodating 50,000 surplus arrivals in hotels now over £7 million a day.
The issue remains one of the most embarrassing challenges to a Tory government whose raison d’être in championing Brexit was to control Britain’s migration and “turn back the boats”. Prime minister Rishi Sunak has made cutting off the flow a central plank of his shambolic immigration policy, with the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda central to his deterrence strategy. Housing those who do succeed in crossing the Channel in overcrowded barges is supposed to add to that deterrence.
With the Rwanda option now stalled in the courts, courtesy of appeals to the European Court of Human Rights, several Conservative ministers are again ominously calling for the UK’s repudiation of the court, which it had a central part in establishing. If they do so, the UK will also be threatening important human rights treaty obligations in the Belfast Agreement, which are underpinned by adherence to the court.
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On Monday the first 15 refugees were loaded on to the Bibby Stockholm, previously refugee accommodation in Germany and the Netherlands, despite warnings from fire safety organisations that the barge is a potential death trap. Locals demonstrated both for and against the arrivals.