There are many holes in the UK’s refugee policy that frustrate both sides of the political spectrum | Daily News Byte

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good morning There was a huge hole in my reasoning in yesterday’s newsletter, which some of you very politely pointed out. Some thoughts on that hole and on UK refugee policy more broadly below.

Inside Politics is edited by Georgina Quach. Follow Stephen on Twitter @stephenkb And please send gossip, ideas and feedback withinpolitics@ft.com.

That’s how it started. . . how are you

Yesterday, I wrote the following:

It is quite fair to say that if you came to the UK without a visa from a NATO member and EU accession candidate like Albania, you would be returned there.

But as a few readers have pointed out to me, this has a false premise: being a NATO membership or EU accession candidate does not necessarily mean you are a “safe country”.

Turkey is an EU accession candidate and a NATO member. As if to illustrate that point, the country yesterday sentenced Ekrem Imamoglu, one of the front-runners for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Istanbul’s popular mayor to run in next year’s elections, to two years and seven months in prison, and banned him from electoral politics. His crime? He has been accused of calling the election board “stupid”, although the mayor has denied the claims.

And as Ayla Jean Yakli details in a fascinating piece, Erdoğan’s government is accused of using court cases to suppress opposition voices.

It would have been crass thinking on my part to claim that NATO membership, let alone something frankly vague as part of the EU accession process, is any kind of useful measure of whether a country is “safe”. While there is room for approaches such as Rishi Sunak’s list of safe countries, candidacy for NATO membership and EU accession should not be used to meaningfully triage applications from people who arrived in the UK by small boat across the Channel.

What I should say is that if you are in a country where you can easily access a UK embassy or consulate then it is a reasonable policy position that you should claim asylum there. Of course, the problem there is that the British government won’t let you do this most of the time. It is fair to say that 4,522 Albanians who sought asylum in the UK in 2021 could potentially seek asylum while still in Albania (a good report on the complexities of why Albanians can claim asylum here in the UK). However, this option was not actually available to the 9,800 Iranians, 6,141 Iraqis or 3,353 Syrians, the other nationalities who made up the largest share of asylum seekers in the UK last year.

But of course the UK government does not provide a way for most people to do so. By a combination of accident and design, successive Conservative governments have created a series of refugee policies that are broadly hostile to refugees but contain many large loopholes. We have broad concessions for people fleeing the Taliban in Afghanistan, conflict in Syria, repression in Hong Kong and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Each of these measures is individually popular but contributes to the UK’s high net migration figures, polling badly and causing panic among individual Conservative MPs. But the tone and generally punitive approach won the party few friends among renegade liberals while convincing opponents of high immigration that the Tory Party was not the right choice for them either.

If you have a consistent refugee policy you at least get political credit for it from someone. If you have one in which you need to make holes, you don’t. It makes adjusting your refugee policy more politically fraught because every time you adjust your policy you are, inevitably, commenting on another country’s politics.

Whether the government likes it or not, all roads lead to providing safe and legal routes to asylum in the UK – the alternative, still, is the smaller boat.

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The Inside Politics team marked Christmas with lunch at Manteca, a beautiful East London restaurant that combines nose-to-tail cooking with fine Italian cuisine. Tim Hayward’s review is here.

If you would like to have lunch with me at Turnips, another lovely restaurant, and support the work of Flick, our financial literacy charity, you can bid here. If you think, not unreasonably, that Stephen Bush is enough to keep me in your inbox every morning, you can also ask FT editor Raula Khalaf for a seven-course tasting menu, for a steak with our economics editor. Chris Giles and many more besides.

Today’s top stories

• Historic Nurses’ Walkout | About 100,000 nurses will walk out in an initial strike starting today. Talks took place between NHS leaders and the Royal College of Nursing over which services would be protected in England, Wales and Northern Ireland during the first strike in the trade union’s history.

• Four confirmed dead | Four people died off the Kent coast after trying to cross the Channel in an inflatable boat early yesterday morning, a year after 27 people died in a similar tragedy.

• Bill helps businesses | Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is exploring plans to continue providing all British businesses with help with their energy bills once winter passes, in what would be a break with the current government’s policy of limiting such help to “sensitive industries” after March.

• Raab has received five new complaints | UK Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab is being investigated over fresh complaints about his behavior towards civil servants, Downing Street said yesterday.

• The Bank of England rate-setting committee is expected to be divided | Central bank policymakers meet today ahead of a balanced decision on interest rates. Analysts said there was a possibility of a three- or even four-way split in the committee.