‘Bogus’ asylum-seekers are not the problem; it’s the millions of genuine refugees we should worry ab

There has been another huge rise in the numbers of those seeking asylum in this country. That the figure for the last quarter is 20 per cent higher than for the equivalent period in the preceding year is disturbing enough. That it is 11 per cent higher than the preceding quarter suggests that the rate of increase is itself accelerating.

When an important topic returns to the news, a columnist may choose between repeating himself and contradicting himself. I see no case for contradicting myself. Twice now for the Times I have written that what is most worrying about rises in the numbers of asylum-seekers is not that some are abusing the system but that many are not; and there are hundreds of millions more where they came from. These latest figures strongly support what I have been arguing. Sooner or later we will have to start turning back genuine applicants.

When an irrefutable argument leads to an unthinkable conclusion, the natural human reaction is to nod wisely and change the subject. My columns about the Geneva Convention on political refugees have (as David Hume put it) fallen dead-born from the press. What little reaction there has been is of the cluck-clucking sort from those kindly souls who object that it would be uncivilised to turn back genuine refugees. So it would, but not a single reader has challenged the premises on which I base my uncivilised proposal. That is because they are unchallengable. So here goes for the third time.

The problem with the Geneva Convention is the Geneva Convention. It is time to review not the system by which we judge claims for asylum, but the concept of asylum itself.

The sting in the tail of the Geneva Convention is the (much later) New York Protocol to the convention. Though the original convention bound signatory states to offer political asylum to claimants who could show a well-founded fear of persecution in their own countries, the signatories restricted its scope retrospectively to the political and ethnic convulsions caused by the two great world wars of the last century.