Just let them in – send “illegals” to Scotland not Rwanda
Blocking migrants by bureaucracy is demeaning and damages Britain's image
Let them in. The small boat people. Asylum seekers who come to Britain by illegal routes. We can't keep them out, clearly. The numbers are doubling every year and now stand at 40,000. We can't send them back or let them drown. France clearly isn't going to stop them, nor is the EU.
We can't keep them in unlawful detention in camps like Manston in Kent – we have a duty to look after refugees humanely. The cost to Britain's international prestige of children crying out behind barbed wire in tent cities is greater by far than the cost of a few hotels.
The accommodation is overloaded because the home office tries to obstruct the flow of asylum seekers by placing bureaucratic obstacles in their way. Trying to discourage migrants by computerised inertia. Spending over a year to process an asylum claim is absurd.
Tory MPs can claim that lefty lawyers are gumming up the works with all their spurious appeals. But that's what lawyers do: enforce the law. The appeals aren't spurious. More than half of these supposedly “illegal” asylum seekers are eventually accepted here as legitimate refugees.
So let them in. Do a deal with Travelodge. We can't afford to have the developing world, and most of Europe, claiming that Britain is opening concentration camps for people of colour, even if many of them are Albanian. Not when Brexit Britain is trying to curry favour for trade deals with the global south.
The present situation is not sustainable because it places Britain on the wrong side of international law. Britain is one of the founding signatories to the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. We are a law abiding country with a humane tradition. Our army of civil rights lawyers will ensure even home secretaries like Suella Braverman are kept to the straight and narrow.
We can't send asylum seekers on a one-way ticket to Central Africa. We are not Australia. We don't do that kind of thing. We're not Denmark either where they have racial quotas in cities and seize the cash and jewellery of refugees at the border. The supposedly liberal Danes were the ones who first thought of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda.
But we aren't like that. So we have to go with the flow. The UK government should set up fast track asylum claim centres, preferably in France – if they'll allow them. Better still set them up in Glasgow, Cardiff and all points north. Nicola Sturgeon condemns the UK government's asylum policies, so let the Albanians come to Scotland where there's a chronic shortage of migrant workers.
Scottish local authorities actually stopped housing asylum seekers in hotels last year on the grounds that they weren't getting the money under the dispersal scheme to pay the bills. Well, tough. If Scotland wants more refugees then Scotland can pay for them.
The south of England has had enough certainly. Someone must get a grip. Be sure that many Labour voters were nodding in agreement when Suella Braverman talked of the “invasion” of illegals in the South Coast. Nigel Farage will be fighting them on the beaches.
By honouring our liberal principles Britain may become a harsher place. Sweden has just elected a far right government because of immigration. That is the price you pay for not being hypocrites. No one said it would be easy.