This recurring feature highlights the most interesting thing to come out of a think-tank each month. The idea is not necessarily to draw attention to the best work or content. Indeed, sometimes a report might be chosen because of its problems. What we are doing here is highlighting think-tank output that tells us something about what’s going on in the policy world, and thinking about what the downstream effects of that might be.
What’s the report?
Stopping the Small Boats: a “Plan B” – from Policy Exchange
What does it say?
This is a report about the “crisis” of migrants crossing the Channel in small boats.
It argues that ‘Plan A’ for dealing with this issue would be to come to some kind of arrangement with France, who would then accept the return of migrants after they land on British shores.
The authors recognise, however, that this is unlikely to happen – and so the bulk of this report is spent putting together a ‘Plan B’. The report proposes removing migrants who attempt to cross the Channel and taking them to an overseas territory (for example bases on Cyprus or Ascension Island). Here, claims for asylum would be processed, and people would then be returned to their home countries, or resettled to “a safe state other than the UK”. No one who arrived by small boat would ever be allowed to settle in the UK, regardless of the strengths of their case.
What should we make of it?
Just to avoid any kind of confusion, I’ll start by saying I found this report pretty grim reading. However, as we’ve talked about on this blog before, Policy Exchange are by all accounts the think-tank with the greatest level of influence on the current government.
What they say matters – and the downstream effects of their output are likely to be more consequential than those of most other policy outfits in 2022. One of the people credited in helping put this report together is Tony Smith, former Head of the UK Border Force. There is serious organisational and credentialised heft here insofar as changing UK border policy goes.
Onto the report itself. The most revealing and interesting section of the document comes on page 14, where the authors are making their case for why migrants arriving by small boat is “specially objectionable” even if it does “not differ from the legal and humanitarian features and ends of all other types and modes of irregular entry” into Britain.
They write that, “by inviting the assistance of national rescue services, they [migrants arriving by small boat] involve the state as a participant in the highly public spectacle of the conspicuously successful flouting of its control of irregular migration”. This spectacle, the very fact of desperate people arriving in this manner, makes “the state an instrument and ring-master of its own impotence – a failure of a democratic self-government”.
There is so much to unpack in those few lines. The role of ‘impotence’ and other phallic concerns in the conservative imagination… we can leave that for another day. But what seems pressing here is the extent to which this seems like the authors putting their cards on the table.
People arriving in this way is bad not because it exposes the lack of safe routes into the country for those who are desperate. It’s not even presented as bad because migrants are assumed to bad in and of themselves. It’s bad because it makes the state look bad. The “highly public spectacle” is the key here.
This is what explains the ludicrous proposals that follow. Because obviously, transporting intercepted migrants off to some far away island is not a very practical suggestion. It would be immensely costly and no real evidence is presented to suggest why it would be effective in reducing numbers of crossings. It is instead just kind of assumed that it would work - because there isn’t really any evidence out there.
But the Plan B proposed here would be theatrical. It would match the migrants’ “highly public spectacle” with an equally public and spectacular response from the state. And to a particular type of person, it would feel effective. It would feel good.
A favourite accusation that modern conservatives like to make of their opponents is that they are “virtue signalling” – doing something essentially pointless to demonstrate their moral correctness. Here we see virtue signalling’s mirror image – vice signalling. Orgiastic and ritualised expressions of cruelty, made for no other reason than to demonstrate one’s capacity to act in that way. If escorting migrants safely to shore exposes ‘impotence’, taking them to a distant land and forbidding them from ever coming to the UK regardless of the merits of their claim – this is supposed to demonstrate virility.
In the first Godfather film, fictional movie producer Jack Woltz explains to mobster Tom Hagen why he intends to ruin someone’s career purely out of spite. The someone had made Woltz look ridiculous – “AND A MAN IN MY POSITION CAN’T AFFORD TO BE MADE TO LOOK RIDICULOUS!”
We can see the ‘Plan B’ proposal made in this report as that energy channeled into public policy. For people who over the last few years have brought us Brexit, who see themselves as having ‘taken back control’ of our borders – migrants arriving on beaches in dinghies is a daily humiliation. It makes liars of them. The response needs to be swift, symbolic and spiteful. The purpose is not really to deal with the ‘problem’ of the arrivals. The purpose is to deal with the problem of the optics. It is to show strength.
Could such an impractical suggestion actually come to pass? Unfortunately, I see no reason not to think so. Similar things happen in other countries. Priti Patel is Home Secretary. This government is on the rocks. I can see why Plan B might come to seem to some like a good idea.
More generally, I also think it’s important to be paying close attention to these kinds of ideas at this point in history. Borders have been militarizing and strengthening for some decades now, and proposals of this kind from within mainstream conservatism – advocating big changes to the human rights act and the refusal to help even genuine refugees who attempt ‘irregular’ entry – show that this trend shows no sign of abating.
However, what is going to change in the coming century is the numbers of people needing to move across borders. Climate change is going to supercharge migratory flows, and temperate, rich countries like the UK are going to be destinations for many. Forget scrapping net zero targets, a very plausible future for conservative environmental politics involves militarizing borders, hunkering down and drawing clear lines around who gets to share the planets depleting resources and who does not.
This kind of proposal might just be a taste of that future.
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