Is the government's small boats plan "in tatters"?

0:01This is a Global Player Original Podcast. The government promised it had a plan for illegal migration. They called it the one-in, one-out deal with France. But the guy who was thrown out is now back in. Is that whole deal in tatters? Keir Starmer is denying that is the case, but Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, has said the numbers entering the UK are shameful. Is the government failing to get to grips with the small boat crisis? Welcome to the News Agents.

0:38The News Agents. It's John. It's Emily. It's Lewis. And the past 48 hours in dealing with small boat arrivals in the UK has not been exactly fantastic. Yesterday, somebody who was part of the one-in, one-out scheme, who was sent back to France, guess what? Was back on a small boat, back on British shores. Who knew you could get a season ticket for small boats? And also, we've heard overnight the French government sort of saying, yeah, I know. I know we're being paid all this money to do all this stuff on the French beaches, but it's all spin, really. We're not going to be wading into the water to slash any boats.

1:18We're just there to kind of make it look like we're doing something, but we're not really doing anything. And all of this comes at a time when the number of people arriving on small boats has hit a record high. So I guess the question I have in all this is that we have always gone back to the principle that the thing that made the small boats so much worse, so much harder was the post Brexit settlement, which left us out on our own. You know, we didn't really have friends. Boris Johnson had done his level best to really piss off the French amongst others. And certainly in the last sort of 18 months, the whole tenor of the conversation and the sort of relationship has changed.

2:00Let's try and work, you know, whether it was Rishi Sunak, actually, the Windsor Agreement, whether it's Keir Starmer with Macron now. Let's try and get our neighbours back on side. Let's try and work together. The one in one out thing. Yes, it's only about one poor fella, you know, going and coming back. But it does seem to suggest that the thing that we were holding out for, which was returns agreements, isn't actually as rock solid as it should be. And I don't understand what's changed. I think it's a really interesting one. I've been reporting on the small boats thing almost since it started.

2:30And it really started sort of in earnest in the kind of 2019, sort of 2020 period. And I think it is a fair question because, you know, people will think, well, why didn't we have this before? Right. Like what? Why has this over the last five years become so toxic and become so visible? And it has become deeply politically toxic. And I think if you speak to it, I know if you speak to people at the heart of the government, they believe that this thing, even more than the economy, even more than the economy, has the potential to destabilize, continue to metastasize and destabilize their own political chances ahead of the next election.

3:03So it is important. I mean, I think the answer to the question is, is like this has always existed in one form or another. and it's complicated but before you had small boats you had lorries people used to come over on lorries which meant that it wasn't nearly as visible you've also seen increased movement around the world by comparison to even you know 10 years ago or 15 years ago migratory flows and migratory pressures have become worse and more complicated and on top of that i mean you mentioned the brexit thing i mean this is that the hard one to kind of untangle a little bit yeah because we did have agreements with the eu we had the doubling convention which technically would allow us to return people to the country eu country of origin where they first disembarked from wherever they came from the truth is is that we didn't use those conventions that much and sometimes it meant that we had to take people as well but you can of course make an argument to say that there was knowledge of among people who might try and cross on small boats there was a knowledge that those arrangements did exist so they were more likely to be returned so you could argue that it was a deterrent and people you know some people would say that it is no coincidence that this problem has been getting worse since we left those arrangements it's also true to say that the whole of europe has been suffering more from this problem in the round as well so it's complicated it's a bit of everything so the question i guess it begs is if we had the rwanda scheme and if it had got up and running well there is no question that the bloke who came in was sent back to france and then came back in again would have been doing that he would have been in rwanda presumably and would that have acted as the deterrent maybe the conservative government was right maybe that would have been the way to have kind of dealt with the problem and limited the demand for people to come across on small boats because they'd have thought oh god i'm going to end up in rwanda if i do this I think that the problem with this debate often is that people talk about the Home Office will talk about push factors and pull factors.

5:00The things that are pushing people from their countries of origin and the things that are, once they've been pushed, attracting them to the UK. And the problem I think often in the politics of this, the way it's discussed, is that one side or the other just focuses on either pull or push and doesn't focus on both. And the truth is it is both. So with Rwanda, Rwanda, I think, is a really, really good example. Look, it is possible that Rwanda would have limited the pull factor because you would say, look, if you end up here, there is a possibility that you end up in Rwanda. And even if you come here, and this was the novel thing about Rwanda, right?

5:31It wasn't just offshore processing. It was offshore processing. And then once you're processed, whether you deserve asylum or not, you stay there. There is no route into the UK. There's no route into the UK if you arrive irregularly, i.e. by a small boat or whatever. That was what was unusual about it. The truth is, though, and it would have obviously been harder and taken longer, but I will bet you absolutely anything that even with Rwanda, people who were sent to Rwanda, if it had happened, would have ended up back in the UK. They would have done what happened with France, i.e. they would have gone all the way to Rwanda and it would have taken longer.

6:03But sooner or later, they would have tried their luck again to go back to the UK because that's what you're dealing with here. You're dealing with people who are, for whatever reason, sometimes because they're fleeing persecution, sometimes because they want access to British labour markets, sometimes because they've got family here and want to be united with their family, whatever it happens to be, you're dealing with people who are highly, highly determined. So, yeah, it would be harder to get back from Rwanda than just being sent back to Calais, of course, but you would find that. You would absolutely be guaranteed to find people.

6:32That's what you're dealing with here, and it's a really difficult thing for anyone to deal with. Another question, then. if the Tories had managed to get the scheme up and running before the election we can go back over the timing of the election date and when Rishi Sunak you know fired the starting gun for the 24 election and should he have waited longer and get the Rwanda scheme up and running but if the Rwanda scheme had been up and running do you think Labour would have still cancelled it if they thought it was being effective in any way I've spoken to people in the heart of the government about this at various different points and they are insisting and they continue to insist to this day that Rwanda would never have worked because legally it wouldn't have worked because ultimately Labour were not going to do what Generic or someone like that might have done which is to leave the ECHR.

7:16Starmer would never have done that not least because there will continue to be such profound questions about how that would impact on the Good Friday Agreement because it's written into Good Friday Agreement. So once you accept that it wouldn't have worked and even then they say that the actual numbers yes it was 300 initially Rwanda had sort of carved out for it yes the Rwanda government said in the end it's possible that you could have had sort of far more but actually it wouldn't have absorbed it wouldn't have been that massive deterrent because it would have still been relatively small numbers i think though i think where the political critique that i would make and i've heard some other people make is to say that it may not have been a bad idea just politically if nothing else to allow the rwanda scheme which was it was supposed to be imminent to play out and those things then to have happened because then at least you would be able to turn around to the Tories and to reform now and say, look, we tried your way and it didn't work.

8:04What it basically allowed them to do was a get out of jail free car where they now turn around. I've done it myself. We've all done it, you know, with Tories or reform. And you turn around to them and say, well, what's your solution? They say, well, we had a solution. It was Rwanda and it was shut down. So I think politically, if not in policy terms, they made a mistake. I was speaking to somebody very close, the prime minister today, and I put your question to them in those words. Is there a world in which Labour wishes they'd let Rwanda run just to see how it played out. And the response that came back was maybe in Shabana Mahmood's mind, in other words, the Home Secretary, would have quite liked to see that, would have quite liked to be on that sort of wing, but not in Keir Starmer's.

8:43He's always wanted to do return deals with democratic Europe under the ECHR. And I think that word democratic is working pretty hard there to remind us that Keir Starmer comes to this, you know as a lawyer as a barrister as a former head of the dpp and it was really important to him that he played nicely with the courts and that it was done within a scheme within a sort of framework of good relations rather than sort of punitive seedy underhand deals with countries that you know we paid ridiculous amounts of money to and got nothing from but so to go back to where we started which was to talk about what's happened you know with this person coming back into the country after they were sent away to france as part of the one in one out arrangement what the french government are or aren't doing and the police are or aren't doing on the you know on the french coastline the present system is not working and you've got shibana mahoud i think she told the times that the home office isn't fit for purpose and i kind of thought oh we're kind of back to john reed and when he was home secretary and saying he said that in 2006 yeah exactly still not and it's still not and you think this department that has got such a huge amount to deal with is somehow still not rising to the challenge that it faces two things i'd say the whole question of small boats has taken up a huge amount of political oxygen in our language and in our sort of conversations over the last three years it's a reminder that it is i think between 4 % and 6 % of all the immigration.

10:17You know, 4 % of the immigrants who come to this country are doing so in small boats illegally. You can say that's 4 % too many. You can say the numbers are bigger, but in the big scheme of immigration, it is very, very small. If people are genuinely worried about the numbers of immigrants, then there is another conversation we're having there. The other thing is something that the Bulgarian government said in the last few days, which is that they have, they offered proof, they think that Putin, the Russian administration government, is working with smugglers to flood Europe with migrants. In other words, this whole idea of destabilisation coming once again from Russian interference.

10:58You know, we've seen it play out in elections, we've seen it play out in referendum, we've seen it play out in many different ways over the course of what the last 10, 15 years. And there is a sense that this is all part of a bigger Putin strategy to kind of make countries question their own democratic governments and say, we can destabilise you by flooding the market with illegals. I think that there is a growing kind of radicalisation within government, is my impression, about what they might need to do. I think in a way, the small boat stuff is quite a good parable for some of the wider defects and movements that you've seen in terms of how Starmer and Labour came to office.

11:38I think there was a genuine belief, again, as within so many other things, when Starmer came in and his team came in, that the Tories had simply been deeply ideological, deeply incompetent, and a little bit of, which in many cases was true, but a little bit of elbow grease and bonhomie and good humour and good relations with the French and the EU might sort this out. And of course, it has done some things. there have been some advancements made and it is absolutely true to say that relations were kind of rock bottom through many of the periods of the boris johnson period and so on and you needed something to do but i think nonetheless i think that particularly with the new home secretary they have been and she said it herself publicly but they have been deeply dispirited by the of the home office i think shibana my understanding is that she feels deeply frustrated by the kind of way the home office operates and by a sort of sense of drift within the department on doing something about this.

12:29And I think she thinks as well that she hasn't got long to turn this around, not only for the government's fortunes, but of course for her political fortunes as well, being talked up as she is a great deal as a potential leadership candidate. She knows. With a very unsafe seat, it has to be said. With a very unsafe seat now. It used to be absolutely safe as houses in Birmingham, Ladywood, but yeah, against potential challenges from the Greens or who knows. So I think there is an awareness of that. And I think that as a result, we're led to believe that in a couple of weeks, she's going to be coming forward with a whole new set of measures and proposals, which I think are going to be uncomfortable, particularly on the legal side of things and the potential, who knows, even disapplication of parts of the ECHR, which is not something I think this government would have countenance or considered 12 months ago and will be uncomfortable for the Attorney General, Lord Hermer, who's one of Keir Starmer's best friends, who is someone who has, you know, prized much of this stuff in terms of international law and so on, and, as you say, Emily, Keir Starmer himself, who, you know, at his core, fundamentally, is an international lawyer.

13:27That is where his sort of politics sits and is. And anything on that will make him uncomfortable. But I think he is being won over by people like Mahmood, among others. Emily, you made the perfectly reasonable point about the small percentage that is represented by those arriving illegally on small boats. But I do think it has outsized importance. I do think it is, you know, you can't tell the British people they're wrong to feel absolutely furious about the small boat arrivals. And I think that politically it is just an imperative. that somehow, by whatever means, the government deals with this.

13:59And it'll be interesting to see what Shabana Mahmood, because I think it offends so many people. The idea that there are these boats arriving, that they're then being put up in hotels. I think it really offends a huge section of the British public. And it feels like a real failure of politics if you cannot secure your own borders. And we saw the way it played out in America. It was absolute rocket fuel for Donald Trump in last November's election, when he was saying that Joe Biden has let everyone come in across the southern border. It is just the same here. I totally agree that any government and any country has to prove that they have control of their own borders.

14:37But I'd also remind you, since you remember Donald Trump, that in 2018, just before the midterm elections, he managed to draw everyone's attention, all the media's attention, every camera person's attention to the southern border where he said there was a big caravan forming. and he took the attention of everyone that was covering news at that time and said this is happening now. It wasn't actually. There was nothing that was happening at that time which suggested that there had been a surge in immigration in 2018 in a big caravan coming up from Venezuela. That literally wasn't true. But it was in 2024.

15:11There had been a huge number of people who had crossed the southern border during the Biden administration. That's just fact. Well, all I would say is we genuinely don't know. I think people are absolutely allowed to feel uncomfortable and concerned about things that they don't control. But genuinely, we don't know how significant immigration really is in most people's lives and how much it has been talked up to help the political fortunes of the hard right. People who have much to gain from destabilizing a government, from destabilizing people's perceptions of whether they can control their own lives.

15:47And I think we have to be super aware of that. We have to be super, super aware that this is something that when you ask people locally, you know, do you care? Do you see a lot of immigration in your own quarter? Do you see? Does that worry you? They say no. Is it a big problem on the national stage? Yes. Now, where does that come from? That comes from a massive gap between a media narrative and what people are actually experiencing in their own lives. And I think we've got to be really acute and aware of that. I would just say that it's such spectacular television to see people getting onto these small boats that are packed and then coming across the channel and landing in wherever.

16:22No one wants to see immigrants dying at sea, 100%. But don't forget that that was exactly what the Daily Mail did during the Brexit referendum. and I actually confronted both Lord Rothermere and David Cameron because a story had emerged at the time that said Cameron had asked Rothermere to stop showing those pictures because that was driving the Brexit debate. And actually, they both admitted it did. You know, they wanted those pictures to stop because they knew what it was doing. And it wasn't doing it before the pictures were driving the narrative. That's my point. I think in a way, I think both things can be true in a sense that...

16:57I mean, I agree that obviously, and I've sort of moved on this even myself, sort of thinking about the relative importance of it, because I think it is important to stress that we're talking about relatively small numbers of people, particularly both the European context, where many other countries often take more than we do. We sometimes have this narrative that somehow Britain is a kind of uniquely soft touch and that we are uniquely taking loads and loads of people. No, this is a continental-wide problem that probably requires continental-wide solutions, which might have been one of the good reasons, you know, if we were still in the room, when much of this sort of EU border policy is being discussed.

17:27But, you know, that's by the by now. But I think it is also true to say that even though it is a small number of people, I think I think because actually most British people are relatively pro-immigration in the abstract. I think most British people actually have been when you consider how big the waves of immigration have been, particularly since Covid, you know, at one point nearing the sort of net migration of nearly a million. It's actually extraordinary how sanguine and how accepting the British public overall are about immigrants and about immigration, which I think is precisely why. And Shubhan Mahmood has made this argument herself, and I agree with her.

17:59It's precisely why irregular migration, which is not controlled, has to be a state, has to be seen to have a zero tolerance policy. Because I think the problem is, is that when you have that sense of lawlessness, that sense of lawlessness at the border, what it does is infect the debate on standard migration, on regular migration, on legal migration. And it metastasizes because you have, you know, bad, bad actors, including people like Tommy Robinson and others who then use the relatively small number for their own purposes, basically to smear and demonize the much larger number. All I would say, though, is if you got rid of the small boats problem completely, you would not shut down Tommy Robinson.

18:42And I think that is the big mistake. Oh, I think, you know, one of his recruiting kind of tools is the small boats. And I think that if you could deal with it. A hundred percent, he would start on a different track. Sure, but it would be less fertile. It would be less productive. I can understand. I mean, look. I don't think people go to him because they think that he's got a really good logical argument. I think people go to him because, you know, he waves a flag and talks about grievances and he can always find another grievance in the British public. And he will. And he will. And he absolutely will.

19:09And people like him always will. But this is such a fertile one. And it's one. I mean, let's be honest as well. You know, you can understand like if you if you're sat somewhere in Britain and you're struggling to make ends meet and then and then suddenly you do see on TV and you see people like Robinson make the argument. These people are arriving out of nowhere and they get put up in hotels and sometimes they are decent hotels and just trying to. Well, they're your hotels. It's your hotels. Trying to explain that to someone who might be receiving nothing from the state when you have someone who's just arrived here out of nowhere, even if they are a deserving refugee.

19:40That's hard, right? And I suppose the point is, is that if you can shut that down. And my worry is, is that I don't know if it can be shut down in its entirety just because of the global factors. And, you know, no other country has been particularly successful at it yet. But if you could shut it down, at least then liberal progressive mainstream forces could have the argument about immigration, legal migration in the round without getting pulled into control, which is an easier argument to win and to have. And indeed, you can take on the really extreme stuff that, you know, we were talking about yesterday, which is starting to become more mainstream, which is going after people who are legally settled here and have been given legal basis to stay in the UK, which actually all of the polling suggests most British people find deeply extreme.

20:25well in a moment while we're on the subject of what is the truth about what is happening we're going to be talking to Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia about how there is trust how there is society how people are quite kind and that we should dial down the rhetoric and we've gone a whole episode without mentioning Prince Andrew that's for you Rory Stewart if you get it you get it we'll be back in a second

20:59the news agents and we're joined now in the studio by the founder of wikipedia jimmy wales and jimmy you've just written a book about the foundations of wikipedia but it's a bigger book than that it feels to me it's also about the idea of trust and human nature which i'm sure a lot of people would say looking at the present tone of debate in this world they'd think you're wrong you know we're not all kind and nice towards one another well i mean we we certainly aren't all kind and nice to each other but the premise of the book is that trust is super important it still exists and we need to bring it back and and build it up in society more broadly and that is your basis on which wikipedia grew which was that people would contribute online to this the kind of the world's biggest encyclopedia the first online encyclopedia all of that and that it would be done by people who had a shared sense of truth yeah and that's that's what we've been doing ever since i mean from the very earliest days of wikipedia there was this idea that you know we have to trust people and that's not blind trust.

22:13You have to sort of think about what to do when something goes wrong. But broadly, we all know in normal day-to-day life, we meet people all the time. Most people are perfectly nice and trustworthy. And we just have to think about how do we bring that out in people? How do we sustain that? How do we support that? How do we make it a little more costly to do something bad and a little easier to do something good? So take us back to the beginning, Jimmy because the word you use you come back to is reliability in other words trust only works if it's very practical if people actually do the thing that they say they will do if you rent somebody's house on Airbnb you trust that the house exists otherwise the whole model falls apart if you book an Uber the Uber has to come it has to be there has to be reliable but with something like this the project is about relying on people to put in details to a massive system that are going to be correct and when you started I mean it could have just been a cesspit of misinformation right frankly that's that's what it could have been well I mean in the in the very earliest days there was no way to be sure and I actually did assume in the very very beginning that, you know, this is like a little side scratchpad project and we'll have to figure out and they'll have to be, you know, an editor in chief of the China history section.

23:39And, you know, we'll have to figure that out. But as it turned out, people come and by and large, they do the right things. So are you seeing everything? Are you kind of like Jimmy Almighty? I mean, how many people do you employ that actually come and fact check and work and and call their own professional work Wikipedia? Well, we do have several hundred employees, but they're not editing the encyclopedia. I mean, some of them do when they go home because they'll be hired from the community and so forth. But everything you see on the website, including what's chosen to be on the front page, the picture of the day and all of that kind of thing, that's all done by the volunteer community.

24:19And no one at the Wikimedia Foundation is tasked with deciding the content of the encyclopedia. Okay, so if I decide to come on and I get up the biographies of, let's say, 10 famous men and I change each one at the end to say, he was a Nazi. How quickly would you spot that? How long would it stay up for before somebody was like, huh? Yeah, what we always say is, yeah, please don't try that. But probably five minutes max. Is that right? It would be very, very quick. And if you did it once, hopefully you would get a nice friendly message saying, hey, you know, don't do that. Knock it off. We're trying to make an encyclopedia here.

24:59If you did it 10 times in succession, you'd just probably be blocked like quite quickly because we have a lot of systems in place. So we have the recent changes patrolers. So these are people who just sit on recent changes. These are all volunteers, mind you, and they're just checking things that come in. I haven't done anything illegal, have I, if I've done that? Well, you're libeling someone potentially. Yeah, calling people Nazis is generally not okay, but it would probably just be reverted. Well, it used to not be okay. I mean, this is part of the thing, though, isn't it? Exactly. I mean, the whole idea of shared truth now, which is that the idea that Wikipedia is a reliable, accessible...

25:39There are those on the far right who don't think it is. They think it's biased and they think it's skewed to the left and overwhelmingly liberal and just giving you the liberal version of the world. Yeah, and there are those on the far left who think the same thing. But yeah, there's a lot of noise about that sort of thing. And, you know, what I always say, so first of all, if people have the idea that Wikipedia has been taken over by left-wing activists, that's just not true. If you have the idea that some of the Wikipedia entries are one-sided and should be more balanced, okay, well, we need to grapple with that.

26:12We need to actually check that and go through the details. And, you know, we want people to come and engage and say, oh, what about this source? What about that source? I mean, there's a lot of open questions in society where it's quite easy to say, oh, well, we've overlooked this part of the argument or that part of the argument. And it's important that we maintain intellectual willingness and curiosity to say, oh, let's see, how can we do better here? And if we don't and if we just get defensive and say, no, we're not we're not biased, you know, so that doesn't really help. something let's say vaccine hesitancy like where would you sort of find that place would you talk about the problems with like covid vaccinations would you i mean how i guess what about tylenol tylenol causing autism yeah no i mean i what i would suspect i haven't looked up that one so vaccines i can speak about a little more authoritatively this is a fairly new sort of odd thing that was said.

27:09Apparently, there was one study, I think we would probably treat it as, you know, it's like, oh, well, here's the evidence, here's the competing claims around it, we shouldn't take a side if there's any question whatsoever. Certainly for something like vaccine hesitancy as a topic in and of itself, I hope there's an article called vaccine hesitancy, which goes through like, here's the stats on people who are hesitant, here are the reasons they give and that many of the reasons are not scientifically valid and so forth should also be a part of that. You know, one of the examples that I really like is, you know, the question of masks in public health settings, COVID masks.

27:49And what's interesting is this is where I come down. So then I'll explain how Wikipedia handles this is, you know, like in hospital settings with health care workers properly trained wearing quality masks, there is good, strong evidence that it reduces transmission. So during COVID, when people were jumping on the tube, half-assed wearing their mask, you know, sort of wearing, sort of not, was that really helping or not? The evidence is very mixed as to whether that did any good whatsoever. And then, unfortunately, that became super politicized, I would say, especially in America, not so much here.

28:23But, you know, your approach should be to sort of say what I just said. Just say, like, okay, actually, the evidence is mixed here. There's evidence one way or the other. So you wouldn't want to say, as a lot of the health authorities did, like the first they said masks don't do any good. Please don't go out Russian buying masks. And then a few weeks later, we're all told you must wear masks all the time. And that undermined trust that the public had. You know, it's like, well, hold on. You said masks didn't help. And now you're saying masks are mandatory. Like, why did you say that? And the reason they said is they didn't trust the public to not panic and go out and buy up all the masks so there wouldn't be any for health care workers.