Admit Britain can’t solve the migration crisis and open up an honest debate

This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers.

The numbers keep rising. In the first seven months of this year, the EU border agency Frontex detected 176,100 attempts to cross the bloc’s external borders in an unlawful way. That is the highest number since 2016.

The main route of arrival is now the central Mediterranean crossing, where Frontex reports the number of irregular crossings has more than doubled in the last year. An estimated 2,060 people went missing on route in the first seven months of the year.

The authorities are so stretched trying to keep up that there must be doubt about whether the official figures are capturing the full extent of the migratory flow.

Upstream, crossings to Britain across the Channel are running at about the same rate as last year, Frontex thinks, although there is anecdotal evidence suggesting it could be higher.

How many people are in Britain illegally already it is hard to say, because estimates vary wildly. Pew Research thought in 2019 it might be as high as 1.2m.

This is the oddest of subjects. Although it is discussed widely, endlessly, in Britain, on radio phone-ins and in news outlets, the truth about it cannot be admitted by government, opposition, or even by us voters.

The truth is that illegal migration at this scale is an intractable problem the British government cannot solve. It is a Europe-wide crisis that has only just begun given the scale of the demographic change taking place in Africa.

Ministers can introduce legislation promising to crack down on the boats and make individual improvements via agreements with Albania, as they have done. But this flow of people is happening with such intensity, and the numbers crossing from countries such as Libya and Tunisia are so large, that it is beyond one government in northern Europe.

There is a bogus quality to much of the Westminster discussion on this. There have been briefings of late from some Tory MPs saying the answer is to scrap British adherence to the ECHR, the European Convention on Human Rights. Supposedly this will unblock rule by lawyers and the government will then be able to begin mass expulsions as a deterrent.

Really? The morning after the deed is done, what would the UK do that it is not doing now? Not much. It can’t ferry illegal arrivals back to France. The French would say get lost. The Royal Navy isn’t going to start ramming inflatable boats in the Channel trying to get here. Perhaps the government could get a few thousand people flown to Rwanda, though they may decide not to stay there.

The flow will continue unless or until the Mediterranean is policed – fortress-style – and countries such as Tunisia are helped with policing and infrastructure to break the criminal gangs, stop the boats and guard their own borders.

Rishi Sunak can no more acknowledge our national impotence than the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer can.

Actually, Sunak could, and should. In daring to try, he would turn weakness into a strength.

In the long rant published this week by axed Boris Johnson guru Dominic Cummings there was a lot of rubbish about him starting a new party to replace the Tories. In amidst his fulminations was the germ of one good point, although he didn’t mean it in relation to migration.

In his latest Substack post, Cummings says that although Sunak works hard as Prime Minister he is overwhelmed. Some of what he claims is unfair. Sunak can point to the work he’s done trying to rebuild  relations with the EU, or on AI, or on endeavouring to maintain good relations with the US, which is not easy when the President is no fan of Britain. Those are not second order subjects.

Where Cummings has a point is in his critique of Sunak taking detail so seriously that he leaves too little space for boldness or even politics.

On migration, Sunak should say that unfortunately we haven’t as a country faced up to the complexity of this massive challenge and most of what is said on the subject is self-delusional. No, this is not about rejoining the EU. The European Union has been ineffective in this area, much to the frustration of the Italians. And Italy is on the frontline. 

A journalist friend on holiday there traveling around by train is the latest to report being astonished and unnerved by the scale of the problem, with so many itinerant men in groups clearly completely unoccupied hopping from town to town in search of anything.

Perhaps a solution will come from Italy, where the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has invested time and Italian taxpayers’ money in helping the Tunisians. Meloni and Sunak signed a “Strategic Migration Partnership” in April and there have been talks between officials over the summer about a formal deal on policing the Med and breaking the criminal gangs who run the trade. If several other countries join, this could be the beginning of something significant.


Climate change fatigue

The problem with climate change, an esteemed fellow journalist said to me the other day, is that as a story it is boring.

Her turn of phrase was purest old Fleet Street. Journalists thirty years ago – pre-internet – talked much more in such terms about what should be classified as interesting and what was dull. I remember in the late 1990s when the news editor in morning conference reading from the newslist of available stories got too deep into repetitive tales of bleeding heart concerns and social policy gone wrong. A gruff senior editor shouted “next!” at the end of each line on the newslist.

The British news business then was a mighty industrial process in which the different departments and classes brushed up against each other, in the pub, in the office and on the road. The language could be rough. The whole enterprise was much tougher, less middle class and more direct than now, all animated by the idea that the hacks were in a constant battle for the attention of fickle readers who might say they wanted to read all the socially aware stuff but were often lying. In reality, many readers cast a quick eye over the bleeding heart stories, stifled a yawn and in a second flicked the page to look for something lively, gruesome or cheering

That journalist I won’t name who said climate change is boring didn’t mean that the changing climate is unimportant or that the consequences will be anything other than serious. What she meant was that the people who bang on about it all the time are boring and the intensity of their boringness makes a complex story boring.

This is primarily the fault of the activists. Watch the latest video of the bores at Just Stop Oil, Britain’s most sanctimonious campaigning group, and that’s saying something, and it is obvious they are the last people you would want to be trapped next to at a drinks party. In the video they are blocking the road, infuriating a mother trying to drive her child to hospital. The Just Stop Oil campaigners move at glacial speed, walking along the road, holding their banners, looking sad, like religious pilgrims in a trance doing penance.

The main complaint against Just Stop Oil and other climate extremists is usually that their antics will anger their fellow citizens and stoke division. I think the bigger concern is that their appearances induce us to change channel, thinking “there’s that bunch of sanctimonious bores again, holding up the traffic”.

The fatigue creates another problem. Why risk asking any practical questions about confusing aspects of the climate situation when, if you do, the bores will descend on social media, accusing you of denialism? So much now passes without proper interrogation.

There was an example this week of how incurious about complexity we have become. A report surfaced claiming that getting rid of pollution may have fuelled the warming of the oceans. Changing the rules on fuel burnt by ships – that used to produce low-lying, reflective ship track clouds – may have exacerbated global warming. An unintended consequence.

This sounds interesting.

Is the evidence plausible? I have no idea, not being an expert on clouds. It got little to no exploration in mainstream media, though. Clouds are always a natural phenomenon, various climate campaigners announced on social media. End of story. Move on.

But how much do we really know? 

A project in Antartica from the British Antarctic Survey is using a new instrument to measure molecules that will help us understand more about the climate. Earlier this year, Valerio Ferracci, Research Fellow at Cranfield University, said: “Antarctica is considered a proxy of the pre-industrial world; a region with minimal human influence. The improved understanding of clouds in this region might help account for how clouds formed in the pre-industrial era when anthropogenic emissions were much smaller than today.”

Great.

“Currently some of the major uncertainties within climate models are clouds and aerosols (that act as nuclei for clouds to form on). By improving our understanding of the key processes involved in cloud formation and development, we can refine their representation in climate models – ultimately reducing that level of uncertainty.”

Hold on, there are major uncertainties within climate models? The discussion on the BBC is framed at all times as being beyond doubt and question. 


Honey, I’m homeless

This week our family moved house again. The contrast in the response from American and British colleagues when they heard this news illustrates the chasm in national attitudes, and may explain why the US economy powers ahead while Britain flatlines. The Americans have so much optimism. It’s normal to move to another state, to start again. It’s the pioneer spirit. 

When I explained that the move would delay our work call, the responses from Americans were enthusiastic and kind.

Congratulations! Best of luck with the move! Well done! 

The British responses were all variations on a melancholy theme – sympathetic, realistic and downbeat.

Oh no, you poor sod. What a complete nightmare. Moving is awful, and so on.


In suburbia

What am I watching? The Good Life, the 1970s comedy in which characters played by Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal quit the rat race and aim for self-sufficiency, turning their back garden into an agricultural small-holding. Next door are the smart Leadbetters, Margo and Jerry, played by Penelope Keith and Paul Eddington. The show was set in Surbiton, south-west London, where we moved this week, albeit temporarily, waiting to buy, while we watch the housing market in a high interest rate environment and wonder what on earth is going on.

I thought watching an episode or two of the Good Life would familiarise me with the whole Surbiton vibe. Didn’t really work. The Good Life was made nearly fifty years ago and a lot has changed.

It turns out that although it was set in Surbiton, the Good Life was not filmed there. The outside shots were recorded in Northwood, the north London suburb out on the Metropolitan line. This was the line immortalised by Sir John Betjeman in his 1973 documentary Metro-Land.

As a teenager, Julian Barnes, whose first novel was Metroland, lived in Northwood, where they filmed the Good Life exterior scenes.

In Mira Stout’s classic interview with Barnes, published in 1992 in the New York Times, the pair travel out on the Metropolitan line to Northwood for a look around the novelist’s former neighbourhood.

They head for his old street, Murray Road. The house isn’t there anymore, Barnes reveals. A block of flats stands in its place.

“This might have been No. 65, around here,” says Barnes. “We stop to inspect a parking lot that may or may not have been his home. “I think I remember this tree,” he says unconvincingly. It is like being guided by an amnesiac.”

Stout describes an eerie, deserted atmosphere. But isn’t that what most places outside a metropolitan centre are like during much of the day? Quiet?

The houses, Stout says, have names such as Glenshee, Beechwood Court and Dinkie. “A man charges out and asks us nosily, “Can I help you?” – that might be the most British question ever.

“Declining his offer,” Stout writes, “Barnes moves on, indicating the prominent Reindeer Pub, which I’m surprised to learn he has never been inside; in response he quotes his own rendition of the Philip Larkin poem “I Remember, I Remember”: “Here’s the pub I never went into/Here’s the childhood I never had.” Then, a resigned silence.”

They cannot find a tea shop so settle for Kim’s Thai Wine Bar, a “Frankenstein of a cafe” where the British national beverage is dispensed from an automated cappuccino machine. After a perfunctory cup they catch the next train back.

Stout writes: “It’s not until the following week on the phone that Barnes lets slip a confidence about his hometown: “Well, I quite liked it at the time. I mean, I didn’t hate it I don’t think,” he says cautiously. “Yeah, maybe I did. . . . Yeah, I did in fact. Yeah, I did actually. I did hate it. That’s true; I loathed it.”

Julian Barnes settled in north London, in Tufnell Park, now Ed Miliband territory. Barnes has spent the last fifty years there.

His view of the suburbs softened with age. In 2018, he returned as a writer to what he described as leafy, neutral, unaggressive outer suburbia – Surrey, that time – using the setting as the starting point for his novel, The Only Story.

“Its 20-ish protagonist itches to escape from what he judges a place of spiritual torpor,” Barnes told The Guardian. “But it is also a place, as he discovers, where something as well as nothing may happen. A big something, which turns out to command and oversee his entire life. I like this idea of a pale background wash, against which the rich colours of emotional action can show up more dramatically.”

Barnes concludes: “Somewhat ruefully, I have to admit that – for me as a writer – suburbia is my kind of place.”