There was much gnashing of teeth at Suella Braverman’s speech on migration to a right-wing think tank in Washington yesterday. The home secretary enjoys taking swipes at sacred cows — she has questioned the value of Britain’s membership of the European Court of Human Rights — and now it is the turn of the United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951. The agreement, drawn up in the aftermath of the Second World War and now ratified by more than 140 states, governs the treatment of those who flee their homeland to avoid persecution and violence. And according to Mrs Braverman, it is not fit for purpose.
She told her audience that the convention must be modernised to reflect the changing nature of international migration. While war and oppression remain powerful drivers of the movement of people across borders, economic imbalances between rich and poor countries are a huge factor. People do not have to be starving to flee their home: Mrs Braverman cited an American study showing that only after countries reach a per-capita income of $10,000 does the appetite for emigration subside. People can earn a liveable wage in their native land and still want to move abroad. She is right therefore to insist on a strict new definition of a legitimate asylum seeker.
If someone other than Mrs Braverman had uttered these remarks the reaction would have been more temperate. Many would agree that a convention devised for postwar Europe might need an update. But the home secretary attracts, and courts, controversy. She has committed the cardinal sin of being the child of immigrants — her parents came to Britain from Kenya and Mauritius in the 1960s — yet a champion of robust borders. She is also, as she proved again yesterday, no fan of the multicultural society, believing that migrants’ failure to integrate into their host societies results in “parallel lives” that undermine community cohesion. These views incense left-wing critics, who expect someone of her background to be a natural supporter of a liberal immigration policy.
Attacking the European Court of Human Rights and now the refugee convention is unlikely to yield much in the way of practical solutions to Britain’s chronic problems with illegal migration, certainly in the short term. With the entire world to convince, Mrs Braverman is unlikely to succeed in rewording the convention any time soon. But she is right to ask the questions that need asking. She may be guilty of hyperbole when she talks of a potential 780 million refugees in the world — there are 29 million people defined by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees as actual refugees. But the pressures on western societies are growing. Up to 40 million people in Africa and the Middle East are thought to favour Britain as a destination.
The main criticism of the home secretary’s foray to Washington is that it is a distraction from the job in hand. As Mrs Braverman pointed out, the asylum backlog is now consuming £8 million per day simply in hotel bills. Tens of thousands of applicants are waiting to be processed because of the lamentable performance of her department. Rhetoric has to be matched by improved results. Meanwhile, the Rwanda policy languishes in limbo as judges decide its fate.
Rwanda has been a nightmare of a policy to implement and one that offends the sensibilities of many Britons. Yet Labour has failed to come up with a convincing strategy to replace it. In the absence of a meaningful deterrent the small boats will continue to negotiate the choppy waters of the Channel. Some 70 per cent of those braving the journey are men aged under 40.
Mrs Braverman is a polarising politician. An ambitious one too. Her speech is likely to be seen as a calling card to the Tory right. But despite her questionable performance at the Home Office she sometimes says things that need saying.
