Roughly three-quarters of people seeking asylum in the UK have their applications granted, two-thirds on initial application and the remainder on appeal. These people have a ‘well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion’ in their home country.

Our Government’s outright refusal to provide safe and legal routes for most refugees to enter the country to apply for asylum means that the majority arrive though covert, unsafe means. These people come here ‘illegally’ because there is no way for them to get here ‘legally’. Only a small minority come via boat. Many die en route.

The Government says that ‘if you come to this country illegally, you will be swiftly removed.’ Without providing legal routes—which the Government has explicitly promised not to do—that statement is incompatible with providing asylum to the majority of people who need it.

Before the 2015 election, nine in ten asylum applications were processed within six months. By 2021, the proportion had fallen to one in ten, cruelly leaving traumatised people in limbo for longer than ever before and resulting in spiralling accommodation costs. The system hasn’t broken due to the weight of applications: the number per year has barely changed since 2015.

Referring to ‘stopping the boats’ is appallingly dehumanising: it’s not ‘boats’ that the government aims to prevent from entering the country, it’s people. Referring to people in dehumanising terms is the opposite of showing compassion.

According to the documents laid before Parliament, the Home Secretary is ‘unable to make a statement that, in my view, the provisions of the Illegal Migration Bill are compatible with the [European] Convention [on Human] Rights.’ In the Government’s view, ‘illegal’ may therefore apply equally to the ‘migration’ and the ‘bill.’

Those who allocate more airtime, pixels or ink to discussing presenters of the BBC’s sports programmes than to analysing the nation’s asylum policy may not be performing a true public service.

The picture at the top of this post is an AI-generated image created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.