THE BIG READ: How my campaign to scrap the asylum system is now taking off

The idea of Britain following Japan by bailing out of the global asylum system is gathering irresistible momentum. This is what will happen in the end.

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash

IF SOMETHING is truly unsustainable then it won’t be sustained. You’d think that much would be obvious to the allegedly intelligent people who run our country.

And you’d think the ensuing approach would be for those people to consider carefully how to establish a new sustainable equilibrium in the relevant policy area. Because trying to sustain something that isn’t sustainable within a democratic political system will otherwise lead to a huge upheaval in voter behaviour that will sweep away incumbents.

Yet the British political class has a rotten record in this regard. It couldn’t even work out that the terms of our membership of the European Union – zero border control, massive net financial contributions and a sovereignty ratchet away from the nation – were unsustainable. So it didn’t bother fighting very hard to renegotiate them and then the “unthinkable” happened, causing shock and trauma across the entire British establishment.

I started campaigning for Brexit in late 2010, when I was chief political commentator for the Daily Express, precisely because I did identify that our membership of the EU was unsustainable. At the time, the very idea of Britain leaving the EU seemed massively far-fetched to my peer group in political journalism. Some of them thought I’d gone slightly mad. And yet the unsustainability – which showed up in countless opinion polls about British attitudes towards membership, free movement and “ever-closer union” – turned out to be a stronger force than conventional wisdom.

Long-time readers of this blog site will know that I have identified something else as unsustainable: the asylum system to which we are signed up through various UN compacts and the European Convention on Human Rights. And I don’t just mean unsustainable in the sense that it must be reformed with a few tweaks to eliminate the most egregious examples of the system being gamed by bad-faith claimants. I mean the whole thing is literally unsustainable and will have to be scrapped.

Hence my article of August 2023 recommending that we take a Japanese approach to asylum (basically: don’t grant it) and instead give the Home Secretary quasi-judicial power and responsibility for granting a small number of exceptional applications for sanctuary each year. There would be no legal appeals system in place. In effect, our vastly expensive immigration tribunal system could be abolished. The nation would restore to itself the power to tell foreign nationals whether their presence within our borders was tolerable or not, with no interference from activist lawyers.

( https://patrickoflynn.substack.com/p/the-big-read-the-global-asylum-system )

Don’t ask me to talk you through all the political shenanigans that will have to be gone through to arrive at a position whereby a British government pulls the plug on the current regime of asylum and loophole-seeking immigration tribunals. I couldn’t have done that in advance on Brexit and yet I knew it was going to happen.

In that case David Cameron privately explained to friends his decision to grant a referendum by complaining “I’ve got UKIP breathing down my neck”. And I was proud to play a role in that UKIP neck-breathing operation.

We can certainly expect electoral pressure to be at the heart of the campaign to ditch as asylum system which has turned into a de facto right for almost any foreign