Pre-Brexit the EU allowed us a returns agreement for asylum seekers - Yorkshire Post Letters
From: Peter Packham, Chair, Leeds for Europe, Roundhay, Leeds.
In your August 19 edition, you reported on proposals from both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats for resolving the so-called “small boats crisis”.
On the front page, Conservative Chair Kevin Hollinrake demanded that Andy Burnham’s government deport asylum seekers to a “safe third country” rather than house up to 1,300 people at an old military base at Linton-on-Ouse. This is Reform-lite, headline-grabbing hypocrisy.
Mr Hollinrake served in the very government that closed all safe routes for asylum seekers to reach the UK, lost control of the asylum backlog and championed the enormously costly and impractical Rwanda scheme.
Having apparently learnt nothing, opposition provides him with the freedom to simply repeat his party’s demonstrably unworkable policies.
Remember, the small boats problem is the creation - unintended, you’d think - of the Brexit advocates. During negotiations, Boris Johnson’s government voluntarily tore up our participation in the Dublin Regulation - the returns agreement that allowed us to send asylum seekers back to the first safe EU country they entered.
They also locked our police out of vital European biometric databases. The Brexit elite didn't "take back control" of our borders; they undermined our ability to manage them and incentivised criminal gangs behind the trafficking of desperate, vulnerable migrants.
In contrast, tucked away on the bottom half of page four, Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey proposed that Britain join the EU’s Migration and Asylum Pact - which requires asylum seekers to apply for asylum in the first country they enter.
Leeds for Europe is not party political, but you would naturally expect us to favour working with the European Union on a continent-wide issue such as this. Had we still been in the EU, our geography means we would have benefited immensely from first-country rules.
Sir Ed's proposals acknowledge that migration requires cross-border cooperation. Entering this pact would restore intelligence sharing and provide a legal, structured route to return arrivals.
Given its seriousness and practicality, that solution should have made the front page. Bury Mr Hollinrake's regurgitated, Reform-lite nonsense wherever you wish.