Andy Burnham coasted into No. 10 via an uncontested leadership election in which he was never forced to share his views on the great and grave issues facing Britain. As a result, when he became Prime Minister we knew little to nothing about how he planned to address the migration crisis, the energy crisis, the worklessness crisis or the prisons crisis. But to govern is to be confronted with events and forced to choose and so we are fast learning who Burnham is. Last week’s scenes from Ceuta, as 60,000 Moroccans swarmed across the Spanish border, seemed to represent the gulf between the rich, soft West, and the people who come here because they want the wealth we are all too eager to give them.
What we’re really being offered isn’t a trade, but an additional route by which asylum seekers will flood into the country
So Burnham was required to speak, to choose, to reveal who he is. What we saw was worrying. He has promised to be ‘relentless’ in reducing arrivals via small boats with a new ‘whole approach’. ‘People want to see this issue addressed’, the PM said, in what might have been thought blindingly obvious. He then demonstrated how clueless he is by adding ‘we also need to build a system that offers safe routes for people as well, because that also takes away the selling point of the gangs.’ Burnham seems to believe that the problem is not the arrival of tens of thousands of unwanted migrants, many of whom we know will cost us a great deal of money, and often be more criminal than the general population. Nor does he seem to understand that the problem is the asylum system which waves through obviously false claims and immigration courts which almost never allow deportations. No, according to Burnham, it’s how people get here in the first place, and if asylum seekers are flown in to Heathrow, rather than brought ashore in Border Force boats after being intercepted mid-Channel, then all will be well.
The PM showed his confusion when he said ‘the public don’t like the idea that the border looks like it’s not controlled. We need to bring back that control. But also we need to offer support for people who genuinely need it.’
Of course, no one likes it that the borders are open, and that anyone who gets to Calais can get themselves brought to the UK. But we also don’t ‘need to offer support for people who genuinely need it’, because genuine need is functionally defined by the British state and legal system as anyone from a poor country who says their life is at risk back home. It’s a system in which billions of people could have the right to come here – a system which could bankrupt Britain shortly before we cease to exist in any meaningful sense. That’s what the British people want stopped, not a particular mode of transport.
It reminds me of Labour’s fixation with closing the asylum hotels. They seem to be unable to accept that the actual issue is that the British people don’t want mass migration anymore. And so they grasp around – we’ll put them in HMOs – as though something else, anything else must be the real problem.
Burnham has showed that he doesn’t really get it. He has also showed the same dishonesty which Starmer became infamous for. The PM’s offer seems to be that the border will be brought under control and in exchange he will introduce ‘safe and legal routes’. But we already know these new routes will begin in the autumn, as we learned from a Home Office briefing in late June, and Net Zero Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh’s remarks on LBC this morning in which she said ‘we will be opening those up in the sort of second half of the year’.
But the asylum system is just as broken as it was when Labour came to power. All the pull factors – a soft asylum system, generous housing and financial support, the near impossibility of being deported and access to the benefits system once asylum is granted – are still intact. So what we’re really being offered isn’t a trade, but an additional route by which asylum seekers will flood into the country. Those who are able to qualify for the ‘safe routes’ will come that way, and tens of thousands of others will continue to sail out into the Channel only to be met and brought safely to English ports by our ‘Border Force’. It’s a con.
This is the Burnham we’re beginning to see revealed: a PM who doesn’t really understand the people of this country.
