The Sunday Times - UK (2021-11-28)

18

NEWS

A blame game has broken out at the top of

government over the migrant crisis, with

allies of the prime minister openly ques-

tioning Priti Patel’s record and the home

secretary’s friends accusing other minis-

ters of doing “sweet f*** all” to help.

Downing Street officials attacked Patel

for “doing nothing for two years” to pre-

vent the passage of small boats laden with

migrants crossing the Channel.

“She has got to get a grip,” one cabinet

minister said. “She has overpromised

and underdelivered for the past two

years. It’s been all mouth and no trousers

and everyone, including the PM, is get-

ting fed up of her.”

There were even lurid claims that the

prime minister had lost confidence in

Patel, but this was flatly denied by No 10

last night.

Another cabinet minister accused the

home secretary of going “missing in

action” and said she had been ducking

requests to do broadcast interviews after

27 people drowned last week as they

attempted to cross the Channel.

Senior Home Office sources last night

suggested the death toll could still rise

with more bodies likely to be pulled from

the freezing water in the coming days.

Patel’s allies hit back at the claims and

described the briefings against her as

“pathetic”. A source close to the home

secretary said: “She has said for the past

two years there is no quick solution. I

would actually ask those briefing, partic-

ularly those in No 10, what is it that she

has not delivered?”

The prime minister has been publicly

and privately supportive of Patel, urging

colleagues to “stick with Prit”. But

patience snapped in No 10 as the small

boats saga capped a month of setbacks

for the government. The number of

migrants to have reached the UK by boat

this year is now approaching 27,000 —

three times last year’s total.

Caroline Wheeler, Tim Shipman

and Dipesh Gadher

18

MIGRANT CRISIS

SUNDAY TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JACK HILL

“You save it today and in

the morning it’s worth just

50,000. It doesn’t make

sense. You can’t plan. That’s

why we try to make it out.”

At present 100,000 tomans is

worth about £2.50.

His second cousin had

drowned, along with his wife

and three children, trying to

cross the Channel to the UK

last year. But Ebrahimi said

he would still try to go.

Afghanistan, of course, is

different. Thousands have

fled since the Taliban

takeover this autumn.

The country’s new rulers

have persecuted minorities

and restricted girls’ access to

education.

In Syria, a decade-long civil

war has ground to a hopeless

stalemate. The intense urban

bombing campaigns, like the

one that destroyed much of

Aleppo, might have slowed,

but when the air-raid sirens

stop, there is still insecurity,

poverty and hopelessness to

contend with.

“If I had the money for it

I’d leave tomorrow in any

way,” said Arav Mohammed,

Dana’s brother.

“I believe if you came from

the UK and experienced

living here like a local, you’d

hate it and try to leave, too.”

parts of the world. But if they

want to return, they can

always return here.”

Yet, like people around the

world, young Kurds in Iraq

have mobile phones that

allow them to access the

internet and see how people

in other countries live. They

can see that life is better

elsewhere.

Kurds from Iran also make

up a large proportion of those

crossing the Channel. They

face different challenges,

living in a country where

ordinary people have been

pummelled by American-led

sanctions and the corruption

of their nation’s leaders.

The Iranian regime, which

fears Kurdish militancy,

ruthlessly represses Kurdish

areas in particular, depriving

them of development and

infrastructure and

persecuting anyone who

speaks out against them. The

sanctions and repression lead

to wild depreciations in the

currency.

“It doesn’t matter how

much you work, you work so

hard for months and you put

aside 100,000 tomans,”

Selam Ebrahimi, a Kurd from

the impoverished town of

Sardasht, told me over the

summer.

graduate told me, does not

mean that you do not want to

live.

In the Kurdistan Regional

Government (KRG) area,

rights groups say that there is

no free local press and little

freedom of expression.

In Sulaymaniyah, an

eastern city, thousands took

to the streets last week to

protest against what they say

is rampant corruption. They

were met with violence from

the authorities.

Unemployment is

endemic. Many poor families

survive on remittances sent

home by relatives in Europe.

One cousin with a steady job

in Birmingham can keep

many heads above the water.

Last week Masrour

Barzani, the multibillionaire

prime minister of the KRG,

dismissed the claim that his

people were desperate to

leave.

“Many want to go to

Europe in search of a

different opportunity,”

Barzani said.

“It’s not a flight of

desperation. I hope the world

knows that these people went

there like every other

immigrant wants to travel

and go in search of different

opportunities in different

LOOKING FOR A BETTER LIFE

IRAQ

SYRIA

TURKEY

SAUDI ARABIA

IRAN

Kurdistan

Autonomous

Region

The official

unemployment rate

in 2018 was 9 per

cent. Today the

number may be

much higher

Mosul Erbil

Kirkuk

100 miles

Semi-autonomous

region in northern Iraq

with a population of over

5m

Kurds form between

15-20%

of the population

of Iraq

The official

minimum wage

is around

£

a month

Thousands

have left Iraqi

Kurdistan this

year for a new

life abroad

80%

of the

population

can read

and write

Around

5.5%

of the population

lives in poverty

homes. Or we might think of

economic migrants, who

leave their country solely to

find a better job elsewhere.

Often, reality lies

somewhere in the middle,

where need and opportunity

meet.

Repression, corruption

and poverty drive people to

look to Europe for a better

life: a smuggler provides the

service.

“People don’t have an

income here, they have no

opportunities,” said Arav, 27,

who like his brother is

unemployed.

He and Dana finished

secondary school, only to

find that there were no

prospects for them.

“We’re young and can’t

find any opportunities, so we

try to go to a country that

gives us an opportunity to be

independent and take care of

ourselves and make a living,”

he said.

“If we stay here we’ll never

become anything.”

Many of the migrants

trying to cross the Channel,

and those who were trapped

in the forests of Belarus, are

from the Kurdish part of Iraq,

an autonomous enclave in the

north of the country.

Iraqi Kurdistan might look

stable from the outside, with

its oil wealth and skyscrapers

in the centre of Erbil and its

sons and daughters of the

ruling class drinking negronis

and smoking shishas on

rooftops. But many who live

there say they see it as a

prison.

Rights groups say that

corruption in the ruling class

funnels cash through

patronage networks that

benefit their own families.

The rich get richer and the

poor get poorer.

There is no active conflict

in most parts of the region,

and people are not starving to

death. But for those without

connections to the ruling

class, many young people say,

the nepotism means that it is

very difficult to advance in

life. Just because you are not

going to die, as one university

‘If you lived like us in Kurdistan, you might risk it all to reach Britain’

Every summer, in their small

town in the Kurdish region of

Iraq, Dana Mohammed, 20,

and his brother, Arav, would

meet local people who had

left years before and made

the journey to the UK.

They would come back to

Ranya on holiday, wearing

nice clothes, and talk about

how good life was in Britain

compared with home, where

corruption, repression and

poverty make life hard and

work very difficult to find.

For young people with

ambition, the brothers

believed, there was little

prospect of a future there.

When Dana asked a local

smuggler about going to the

UK himself, he was told that it

was easy, so he set off.

It was not easy, it turned

out. But this month he made

it across the Channel on a

small boat.

Now he is in the UK. If he is

granted leave to stay in the

country, he will start to work

and send money back to his

family.

When we think of people

coming to Europe, we might

picture refugees fleeing

bombs raining down on their

Louise Callaghan

Middle East correspondent

If we stay

we’ll never

be anything

Patel came under sustained fire in a

meeting of the Cobra emergency com-

mittee on Wednesday, and a second

meeting of ministers and officials in the

cabinet room on the same afternoon.

Among those questioning her actions

was Dominic Raab, the justice secretary

and deputy prime minister, who has

been charged by Johnson with reforming

human rights legislation to deter asylum

seekers from coming to the UK.

One Downing Street official said: “She

got an absolute pasting in the meetings,

with other ministers questioning her per-

formance in pretty blunt terms. She’s

done absolutely nothing for two years. It

just gets worse. Everyone else is sick of

listening to the excuses.”

Earlier this month, Stephen Barclay,

the Cabinet Office secretary, was tasked

with leading a cross-government review

into how to prevent migrants crossing the

English Channel. Patel’s allies claim this

was an acknowledgment that other

departments had done “sweet f*** all” to

help address the problem.

However, cabinet sources are wither-

ing about Patel’s penchant for explosive

language and lack of delivery.

Others accused Patel of making inflam-

matory public statements that made it

more difficult to get the French gov-

ernment to help. An aide to a cabi-

net minister added: “The prob-

lem with Priti is that her

approach with the French has

tended to make things worse

rather than better. She has

been a diplomatic disaster.”

No 10 insiders say the

small boats problem has,

with the exception of

Covid-19, been the one

that has consumed most

of Johnson’s time over the

past year. “Boris has been

raging about this for

months,” said a Whitehall

official. “He is very frus-

trated that he seems to

Patel’s fury as bitter blame game

The home secretary insists she has

been let down by colleagues, but

cabinet patience is wearing thin

still be having the same discussions about

what to do as he was this time last year.”

Friends of the home secretary

rounded on Ben Wallace, the defence

secretary, who is tipped to succeed her if

she is forced out, as well as Liz Truss, the

foreign secretary, and Raab, Truss’s pre-

decessor in that job. “She’s asked for help

from the MoD to find military sites that

could accommodate asylum seekers to

get them out of hotels but that’s never

materialised,” a friend said.

“Similarly she has asked for help from

the Foreign, Commonwealth and Devel-

opment Office on negotiating returns and

that’s never materialised either. The one

thing they are supposed to do is to speak

to foreigners and foreign countries.”

Patel is frustrated that Border Force

has refused to enact her policy to turn

around the small boats. But other

cabinet ministers believe this is

a plan liable to end up killing

more migrants.

Patel is also angry that

fellow cabinet ministers

have so far blocked a

radical move to “dero-

gate” from, or revoke,

certain articles of the

European Convention

on Human Rights (ECHR) which migrants

are said to be using to exploit the asylum

system. It is understood that this was

raised in Wednesday’s Cobra meeting.

They claim that certain clauses, including

the right to family life or the prohibition

of inhuman and degrading treatment, are

being interpreted too liberally by immi-

gration judges and are routinely allowing

claimants with weak cases to remain in

the UK.

But the proposal, which the home sec-

retary first raised last year, has been

blocked by ministers on the advice of For-

eign Office lawyers. “A year ago, she sat

around the cabinet table in various meet-

ings and was told: ‘No, you can’t do that;

it will be seen as too radical’,” Patel’s

friend said.

“So there’s a reality check for those

people who are now briefing against her

because many of them sat in the room

and completely dismissed all the sugges-

tions and ideas she put forward.”

Countries trying to derogate from the

ECHR normally have to prove that they

are “in a time of war or other public

emergency threatening the life of the

nation”.

The powers were used during the

Troubles in Northern Ireland. In 1978, the

government was allowed to revoke

Article 5 — which guarantees the right to

liberty and security — in order to detain

IRA terrorist suspects without trial.

The home secretary also blames cabi-

net colleagues for blocking efforts to get

asylum applicants processed in

another country.

Lord Ken Macdonald

QC, a former director of public prosecu-

tions, said the migrant crisis — despite

last week’s deaths in the Channel — would

struggle to meet the threshold for deroga-

tion. “Clearly these landings are a serious

problem and need to be dealt with,” he

said. “But to derogate from our interna-

tional responsibilities as she suggests, the

home secretary would have to establish

that we face a crisis of such gravity that

the very life of the nation is threatened.

“I very much doubt she could demon-

strate that by pointing to a few hundred

migrants arriving each day in the UK.”

Macdonald also pointed out that some

elements of the convention, including

Article 3, which prohibits torture and

inhuman or degrading treatment, bestow

intangible rights that cannot be over-

turned, even on a temporary basis.

The prime minister has asked Raab to

look at the ECHR. A source close to John-

son said: “He is bit squeamish about it but

it’s a problem and he’s asked Dom to look

at it.”

Relations between Britain and France

hit a new low last week when Johnson

wrote to President Macron demanding

co-operation over the migrant crisis. He

said that unless the two countries worked

together more migrants would die.

Macron responded by cancelling talks

with Patel this weekend. It is understood

that she now fears that stalemate with

Macron will last until the French election

in April.

Last night the home secretary issued a

further appeal for collaboration. She said

she had had “constructive conversa-

tions” with Gérald Darmanin, the French

interior minister, and revealed that

Home Office officials were in Paris on Fri-

day.

“As I have said time and time again,

there is no quick fix, no silver bullet. The

UK cannot tackle this issue alone, and

across Europe we all need to step up, take

responsibility, and work together in a

time of crisis,” she said.

“Next week I will continue to push for

greater co-operation with European part-

ners because a failure to do so could

result in even worse scenes in the freez-

ing water during the coming winter

months.”

A No 10 source denied the prime min-

ister had lost confidence in the home sec-

retary: “The PM is full square behind

Priti.”

Priti Patel has

asked other

ministers for

help, her friends

say. In the camps

near Dunkirk,

above, people

waited for new

chances to cross

the Channel and

showed photos

of those missing

since the dinghy

disaster on

Wednesday