‘Stop the boats’ progress remains lukewarm as ministers shift blame

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Good morning. Rishi Sunak is in California and chancellor Jeremy Hunt is on holiday too, as Westminster takes a collective break ahead of election year. But there’s still stuff happening, if you look closely enough, and this week we’re going to hear a lot more about one of Sunak’s five priorities: “stop the boats”.

Braverman’s grip

After several weeks where it looked like the weather gods in the UK had hit fast-forward to autumn, this week we should get a glimpse of summer. Good news for those of us still here, but also for people smugglers in France, whose days spent ferrying migrants across the English Channel become easier under temperate skies.

Suella Braverman will be focusing on the government’s “stop the boats” message, but a quick look at the data suggests the dinghies are still very much coming across the Channel.

The latest data from Migration Watch UK suggests that crossings so far this year are just over 15,000, down 14 per cent on the same period last year. An improvement, but not a dramatic one, and a lot of this is dependent on weather.

Braverman will be hoping that this week she can finally start moving some asylum seekers into the Bibby Stockholm accommodation barge moored off Portland in Dorset, a vessel described as having a 1970s ferry vibe.

There will be what deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden has called “howls of outrage” over this, but Braverman will trumpet this development as evidence of progress in moving people out of hotels.

The government’s failure to get a grip on the asylum process is most visible when local hotels — perhaps the only nice place in town, used for wedding receptions or 18th birthday parties — are turned into hostels.

You can’t blame hotel owners for grabbing a chance to fill their rooms for 12 months a year, courtesy of the government, but the local impact is keenly felt, as I discovered earlier this year on a visit to Skegness.

This situation isn’t going to change any time soon. Which is why the government is casting around for other people to blame for the Channel crossings and asylum backlog, and the list is growing longer by the day.

Today we’ll see ministers announce a big increase in fines for unscrupulous employers who give jobs to undocumented migrants or landlords who provide them with accommodation.

Rishi Sunak last month controversially latched on to reports in the Daily Mail about corrupt lawyers helping people to claim asylum when they had no obvious reason to be granted it.

“The Labour party, a subset of lawyers, criminal gangs — they’re all on the same side, propping up a system of exploitation that profits from getting people to the UK illegally,” he tweeted.

Last week, Sunak was urging social media companies to stop people smugglers touting for business. You can hardly fault the government for its effort to use every lever at its disposal.

But in the end, if real progress hasn’t been made by the time of the next election, any number of initiatives and scapegoats will not spare the government from the wrath of the voters.

Foreign feud

Braverman — or “sources close to Braverman” — was in action over the weekend on a different issue, warning that the threat from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards was now the biggest security risk facing the UK.

That’s quite a claim, given the other potential threats that have presented themselves in recent years, including Islamic State and Russia, and it has caused a bit of disquiet in Whitehall.

But security minister Tom Tugendhat recently told the Jewish Chronicle that Iran was hiring organised criminals to spy on Britain’s Jews in preparation for a potential assassination campaign.

As I report today, the Foreign Office is not especially happy to see the Iranian threat blazed across the front page of the Sunday Times, at a time when ministers are at loggerheads over how to respond.

Braverman and Tugendhat want to proscribe the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terror group — as does the Labour party — but foreign secretary James Cleverly is resisting.

There are those in the Foreign Office who fume that Cleverly has been the target of repeated negative briefings in recent months, suggesting he is too weak or too lazy to stand up to the civil servants in his department.

Cleverly’s argument — and there is no sign yet that Sunak is inclined to overrule him — is that Britain is already sanctioning the IRGC and senior Iranian officials; labelling it a terror group would be counterproductive.

Those briefed on the issue speculate that such a proscription could endanger UK-Iranian dual nationals in Iran, would probably see the UK ambassador expelled from Tehran and set back any hopes of restarting the moribund Iran nuclear deal.

I’m told the issue is still live and the labelling of the IRGC as a terror group is still an option, but for now it remains an issue of serious tension at the heart of the government.

Now try this

Not exactly Stephen Bush territory, but I’m heading down to the cricket at Taunton on Friday to watch England’s hottest batting prodigy, 19-year-old James Rew, who scored his sixth century of the season yesterday. And if that isn’t enough, after the match, there’s a concert by West Country legends the Wurzels. Cider will flow.

The second tip may appeal to those preparing for long drives down to France: I stumbled across a perfectly pitched French refresher course, Little Talk in Slow French. Great topics such as French colonialism, climate change and taboo subjects to avoid in the office — all done in breezy bite-sized chunks.

Top stories today

• Increased visa fees could ‘undermine UK competitiveness’ | Rishi Sunak is facing calls to rethink a planned increase in visa fees for migrant workers, with business groups arguing that raising the levies will harm the UK’s competitiveness and hamper efforts to plug labour shortages. 

• Short shrift | Thousands of leaseholders in low-rise blocks of flats in England are facing large bills to replace cladding and correct other fire-safety defects after being excluded from legislation that capped the amount residents have to contribute to remedial works six years after the Grenfell fire disaster.

• New vaccine lab | The UK is better prepared for the next pandemic, according to the top scientists at a new state of the art vaccines centre, although they acknowledged that resource constraints and uncertainty over what form the next deadly disease might take would still make the rapid development of a jab challenging.

• ‘Humiliating’ | Liz Truss has nominated one person for an honour for every four days she was in office. Fourteen people remain on her resignation honours list, which is being vetted by the House of Lords appointments commission. But at least two people turned down her nomination, the Times’s Matt Dathan revealed, including one who said they felt it would be “humiliating” to receive an honour from Truss.