Small boats could be the issue that swings the next election. Photographs of new arrivals being shuttled from beaches to free hotels is a potent symbol of a government in chaos. A country and its borders are the same thing. If the borders cease to exist, so does the country. Voters grasp this instinctively but the collective mind of parliament has failed to realise it for years. Rishi’s crackdown represents a great opportunity for him and a moral crisis for Labour. Sir Keir Starmer couldn’t find a consistent line at PMQs but he succeeded in exposing the scale of the problem.
Last year, he said, 18,000 newcomers were deemed ineligible for asylum. ‘How many have actually been returned?’ The Labour benches reverberated with finger-wagging murmurs. ‘Ah, mm, yes, good point.’ Rishi answered a different question and said that the numbers deported had doubled since last year.
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