It's not only 'Little Englanders' who want to tackle illegal migration

The Government’s policy of sending illegal migrants to Rwanda has now received a deeply important endorsement. It is one that really ought to change a lot of minds.

The European People’s Party, the main centre-right formation in the EU, has adopted a scheme so similar that it is hard to tell apart from Rishi Sunak’s plan to stop the boats.

In its platform for the approaching European elections, scheduled for early June, the EPP has stated that it seeks ‘a fundamental change in European asylum law’. It argues that the EU and its member states ‘must have the right to decide’ to whom and where asylum is granted.

It proposes deals with safe third countries, where those applying for asylum can be put through the process.

Mr Sunak is understandably pleased, and writes in The Mail on Sunday today: ‘I said when I first became Prime Minister that others would recognise a meaningful deterrent is the only way to stop the boats – and now even top parties in the EU are following our lead.’

MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: The European People’s Party has adopted a scheme so similar to Rishi Sunak’s plan to stop the boats it’s impossible to tell them apart

There are many ways in which this is welcome. First, it is a recognition by leading, responsible politicians in major, civilised European states that there is a problem of mass migration on a scale not previously seen.

This affects almost all the continent’s countries. It is also an acknowledgement that existing laws and measures simply do not deal adequately with this crisis. If these migrants seek asylum, then surely they should be ready to accept it in any safe country.

The idea that you are in such straits that you need to flee from your home and claim asylum, but can then pick and choose which country you live in, has always been contradictory. Refugees flee from persecution. They do not travel to better their economic conditions.

For millions of British people, the problem has been clear for many years. They are puzzled as to why those who have reached France, one of the safest and most civilised nations in the world, should then have some sort of right to press on, often in circumstances of grave danger, to Britain.

The EPP decision ought to stimulate thought among all the self-congratulatory and self-righteous campaigners against the Rwanda policy. Active in politics, the law, the charity sector and the media, most of them believe that UK membership of the EU was a higher form of government than national independence.

Millions of British people are puzzled by the seemingly contradictory idea that people who need to flee their home can then pick and choose which country to live in

They revere the EU’s laws and institutions and sneer at the supposed insularity, bigotry, narrow-mindedness and backwardness of Leave voters. Yet here are major parties in that same EU, who cannot be accused of being ‘Little Englanders’, adopting what is in essence a British policy.

And they are doing so because they recognise that the current arrangements cannot be sustained. All serious nations must have the power to decide who they let in and who they refuse, and who shall have the right to live within their borders.

This interesting and important development ought to deflate the opponents of the Rwanda scheme, though many are so convinced of their own virtue that this may be a vain hope.

What it certainly does is place a great deal of moral and political force in the hands of Rishi Sunak. With every day that passes, it becomes clearer that there is genuine distance between the Tories and Keir Starmer’s Labour, smooth on the outside but still seething with radicalism on the inside. There is still everything to fight for.

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