Labour has gone suspiciously quiet on the issue of illegal immigration

The migrant crisis (if “crisis” is the right word) is electorally toxic for a government that promised to take back control of our borders post-EU. 

This week’s revelation that the number of removals of illegal immigrants has reached the lowest level since records began will play badly across the country, and not just in traditional Tory areas. That the figures coincide with record numbers of migrants arriving directly from France in makeshift boats on the south coast compounds the political seriousness of the issue.

To a certain type of (mostly London-based) commentator, this crisis is hardly deserving of the description. So what if a few hundred, or even a few thousand migrants take their lives in their hands to make the channel crossing? It’s not as if we’re in danger of being unable to cope, and anyway, stricter border controls are both unfair to potential asylum claimants and are also the cause of the increase in illegal means of entry.

This analysis misses – even denigrates – at least one vital perception of a large proportion of Britons: the simple unfairness of an activity that enables people with no right to enter the country to skip the queue by paying large amounts of cash to some of the wickedest people on the surface of the planet: people traffickers.

During the early noughties, media coverage of migrants hiding in the backs of lorries – frequently with the driver’s knowledge and after he had been paid handsomely to turn a blind eye to his additional cargo – was a daily occurrence. MPs who sought to justify or excuse such activity were regularly met with disapproval, not just from their white, indigenous constituents, but by immigrant families whose forebears had successfully navigated Britain’s convoluted and expensive immigration system. Being granted legal access to Britain was a feat for which they had worked hard and of which they were proud; watching others blithely skip the hurdles they themselves had been forced to jump was a frustrating experience.

It was unfair: a direct snubbing of one of the fundamental qualities thought to define Britishness.

Priti Patel, the home secretary, is under pressure from government back benchers to turn this particular tide, to ensure that the vast majority of those arriving on Kent shores are removed immediately or at least as soon as possible thereafter. What is significant is that she is under no similar pressure from opposition MPs.

The Labour leader, Keir Starmer has never raised the Kent landings at Prime Minister’s Questions. There is some sense to this: why interrupt an opponent when he is making a mistake? And anyway, he could not be sure that criticism of an absence of a tough approach, even to illegal immigration, would meet with the full-throated approval of the benches behind him. This is the party, after all, whose MPs and Lords pen letters of protest to ministers whenever another plane load of convicted rapists and murderers is set to depart these shores to deposit them back in their home country.

In the wider nation, however, a tougher approach to illegal immigration would benefit Labour’s electoral efforts, except, perhaps, in a small number of London seats where the party could probably endure the abstention of a few thousand voters without significant losses.

After all, voters are hardly likely to trust the keys of the Home Office to a party that, like those HGV drivers two decades ago, is willing to turn a blind eye to illegal activities right under its nose. Not for the first time, Starmer has been given an opportunity to make common cause with the majority of voters, but (again, not for the first time) one that would mean coming to blows with much of his own party.

Labour in government acknowledged and accepted this challenge and faced down its internal party critics who disapproved of the large fines imposed on drivers who were found to have transported illegal immigrants across our borders. But the disapproval of Labour activists counted for little among angry voters who just wanted a fair immigration system that treated everyone the same and gave no favours to those unwilling to jump the queue to the benefit of people smugglers.

It seems odd that a party of opposition is so unwilling to challenge the government on a policy on which it is so clearly failing. Assuming that only far right, beyond-the-pale voters with no interest in supporting Labour are infuriated by the sight of immigrants cocking a snook at Britain’s immigration laws would be to misjudge the situation. Many centre-ground voters, while they may not allow themselves to become over-heated by the subject, will nevertheless acknowledge the fact that allowing such migrants to remain indefinitely in Britain when many thousands of others are rejected after applying through formal channels is unfair and unjust.

One of Tony Blair’s most successful phrases – coined even before he became Labour leader – was “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. It played well to both sides of the criminal justice debate, promising action that both could approve. It was also right. 

Labour needs to revisit the reasons behind its success in the 1990s and in government in the first decade of this century. Sticking its head in the sand is no solution to a major national controversy. Waiting for the government to fail is not opposition; reassuring the people that Labour would be far more effective and competent in dealing with illegal immigration is both the most difficult and the most effective way back into government.