The Telegraph, 3 February 2024
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/03/too-many-churches-are-facilitating-bogus-asylum-claims/
Such scams are a symptom of a deeper malaise. Without leaving the ECHR, we will never get to grips with illegal immigration
When do we say “enough is enough”? Why, four years after Brexit, have we not yet taken control of our borders, or shown any sign of being close to doing so?
I was proud to campaign to leave the EU in 2016. I wanted our country finally to regain sovereignty over our borders, end free movement of people and turn the tide of uncontrolled mass migration. I am angry that, despite delivering this landmark restoration of our sovereignty, we have not taken back control of our borders. Far from it.
For years, I defended the Home Office in immigration cases as a barrister and saw the reality of our broken asylum system. Then, it was sham marriages and bogus colleges that allowed migrants to game our system.
But, as Home Secretary, I saw how the racketeering has continued, and expanded in myriad ways.
Today, it is adults claiming to be children, Muslims pretending to be Christians, heterosexuals feigning homosexuality, healthy people alleging mental illness, economic migrants impersonating refugees fleeing persecution, those who have chosen to come here arguing that they have been trafficked as slaves, or those masquerading as political dissidents.
Many asylum seekers are genuine and it’s right that we offer help when their cause is just. But far too many are bogus and using our laws against us.
Take the church as an example. While at the Home Office, I became aware of churches around the country facilitating industrial-scale bogus asylum claims.
They are well-known within the migrant communities and, upon arrival in the UK, migrants are directed to these churches as a one-stop shop to bolster their asylum case. Attend Mass once a week for a few months, befriend the vicar, get your baptism date in the diary and, bingo, you’ll be signed off by a member of the clergy that you’re now a God-fearing Christian who will face certain persecution if removed to your Islamic country of origin.
It has to stop. We must get wise to the problem. It is no wonder that the former dean of Liverpool Cathedral noted that he converted about 200 asylum seekers to Christianity over a four-year period – but he doesn’t recall baptising any Muslim who was already a British citizen.
It’s why I set up a dedicated taskforce focused on rooting out the grifters enabling this sordid business. Through more reporting, increased investigations and tougher enforcement, it has succeeded in identifying some of the bad actors. This work must continue in earnest.
Our system remains broken when asylum seekers convicted of sex offences may remain in the UK. Once you break our laws, surely you forfeit any right to stay here? We need a system whereby foreign offenders automatically lose their right to claim asylum or plead modern slavery. No exceptions, no caveats.
Now, you’ll say: why didn’t you fix it when you had the chance as Home Secretary? Well, during the past year, we increased the number of removals of foreign offenders and those illegally here – an improvement on previous years and back to pre-Covid levels.
But the real reason we have not yet got to the bottom of the problem is that every time the Government passed yet another law, we balked at the chance to exclude the vague and evolving rules contained in international law, be it the Refugee Convention, the European Convention on Human Rights or the Human Rights Act.
While in government, I pushed to exclude these treaties from our asylum law, but to no avail. I laid out proposals on how to cut the Gordian knot of human rights law that is the root cause of the problem. These instruments stymie our ability to control who comes into our country, who stays here and who must leave.
The reality of government is that if the consensus is not with you, then even as Home Secretary you will not prevail. Instead, we got tweaks, compromises and half-measures. Post-Brexit, we did not take back control. Rather, we have ceded it to international law, a foreign court, and activist judges and lawyers.
I don’t seek to demonise those who, understandably, seek a better life abroad. Hundreds of millions of people live in poor conditions around the world and will have a profound desire to better themselves and their families. My own parents had that same deep longing when they emigrated – lawfully – to the UK from Kenya and Mauritius in the 1960s.
People may come here lawfully, in an orderly manner. But what we are talking about with illegal immigration is the deception, criminality and playing of the system that so defines our asylum policy in the 21st century.
We can dance around the issue for years to come, but the truth is that our government will always be limited in what it can do unless it withdraws from the European Convention on Human Rights. The jurisprudence from the Strasbourg Court that is binding in the UK has taken a broad and ever-expansive approach to the very noble rights set out in the original text. We’ve tried working within its boundaries for decades, but that approach has failed.
We can no longer allow amorphous concepts of international law to override the supremacy of Parliament, especially in matters of vital national interest. We cannot have fought for freedom, self-government and a voice for the British people in 2016 only to afford foreign offenders greater rights than their law-abiding victims.
The British people have voted time and time again for proper control of our borders. Yet we still have dubious characters coming to our country illegally every week. It is no wonder people are giving up on politics. This is a national-security and public-safety emergency. Gang warfare, terrorism, drugs, rape, murder, acid attacks – those capable of such heinous crimes will keep coming until we get serious, put the British people first, and pass the hard-headed laws required to properly secure our border.
