Stop the boats: will immigration define the next election?

It is not impossible that by the time the next election arrives in 2024 the legislation could still be “bogged down” in a battle with courts, frustrated by the European Convention on Human Rights, which would mean the “scene could then be set for a re-run of the party’s 2019 election pledge to ‘Get Brexit Done’, only with removal from the ECHR the cornerstone of the 2024 manifesto”, said HuffPost.

For its part, Labour “looked likely to oppose the Government’s crackdown on Channel migrants”, said the Daily Mail, with Keir Starmer dismissing the scheme as “not workable”.

Indeed, workability is the “attack line the leader of the opposition’s office wants to fight on”, agreed The Spectator’s Katy Balls, but others within Labour, such as Diane Abbott, have criticised the plan on humanitarian grounds, which may be precisely the battle that aides in No. 10 are hoping for. 

Braverman was “quick to dismiss the opposition as lacking a solution of their own” or even “an intention to deal with the problem”, Balls added.

What next?

If a clash of immigration and asylum policies does become the political battleground for 2024 that the Conservatives hope, Britons are still more likely to trust Labour, according to new research by Ipsos. But the Conservatives are closing the gap.

According to the findings, a third of Britons trust Labour to have the right policies towards asylum seekers (35%), and immigration (34%), ahead of the Conservatives on 28% – “but trust in the Conservatives has risen 7-8 points since November”, the market research firm said.

For The Times’s editorial board, Britain is “not an unwelcoming country to deserving cases” but “it has the right to protect its borders.” In making small boats a central platform of his prime ministership, Sunak “is taking a considerable but justifiable political risk”.

Not so, responded The Guardian in its own leading article today. The government’s playbook “is not only callous but dangerous and inflammatory”. It is for this reason its legislation “must be opposed in political and humanitarian terms, as well as pragmatic ones”.

However, leading up to the 2024 election, this may be exactly the battle the Conservative Party wants, said Sky News’s Ali Fortescue. “Labour know they need to convince voters they can be the party of tackling immigration”, but they know too that they are “treading a tricky political path”.

Yet even for Sunak, “talk is one thing, delivery another”, Fortescue added, and his “stop the boats” slogan is “not as straightforward as it seems”. 

The slogan is a policy target “that has eluded not just successive British governments but every government in the world”, said the Financial Times’s Stephen Bush. “No country, no matter how authoritarian, has managed to prevent all movement in or out of it”, he added.

“I don’t think Sunak will be the first to achieve it…and that he seems determined to go into the next election talking about his probable failure on the issue is the biggest gift to the Labour Party since Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget if you ask me”, Bush concluded.

Article source: https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/politics/959967/stop-the-boats-will-immigration-define-the-next-election