The “media bloodhounds” are at it again, says Allison Pearson in The Daily Telegraph, this time with a “hysterical 24/7 campaign to get Suella Braverman sacked”. The Home Secretary’s latest supposed crime is to have told the truth about Britain’s immigration crisis: namely, that the tens of thousands of people landing on the Kent coast are not all desperate mothers and children. As the Border Force has acknowledged, the “exponential rise” in Channel boat crossings this year is in fact the result of 10,000 adult men arriving from Albania, a “stable country that hasn’t seen a war in 25 years”. Are we not allowed to be “just a teensy bit alarmed about that”? Or admit that we don’t want to spend £7m “every single day” housing asylum seekers? All Braverman has done is try to give the British people what they keep voting for: “strong borders and lower net migration”.
But the government is making the situation worse, says Enver Solomon in The Guardian. Officials knew the current surge was coming and warned ministers about it last year. They were ignored. As a result, we now have people who “fled persecution in Iran and Afghanistan” catching scabies and diphtheria in vastly overcrowded processing centres. The Tories have long thought the best tool in the fight against illegal immigration is deterrence – to treat asylum seekers with hostility and ship them off to Rwanda. But deterrence isn’t working. Instead, we have been left with a “dysfunctional system that is far from fit for purpose”.