Thread by @ZoeJardiniere

Priti Patel announcing her new headless plan for immigration on #r4today...

Hold tight, friends, I know it's awful. I'm going to try to take these proposals point by point.

https://twitter.com/JCWI_UK/status/1374632073252769793

Most immigrants in our system are forced into a "temporary" status for years or even a decade before they can get a permanent status. Patel loves this despite the pointless misery it causes.

Now they want to do the same for people recognised as fleeing persecution. #r4today

People who are recognised as fulfilling the extremely stringent requirements of the refugee process are by definition victims of trauma and persecution.

Making their lives unstable for years, denying them support, is obviously cruel, unnecessary & counter-productive. #r4today

Patel claims her plans will break the business model of the smugglers (just like every one of her predecessors has said).

But the smugglers rub their hands with glee every time the UK fuels their business with another step on it's failed path of so-called "deterrence" #r4today

Nobody is more pleased than people smugglers when we decide that a route for a few thousand hand-selected people per year who we bring in as refugees from the conflict zone that is flavour of the month are the only legitimate refugees.

How unrealistic can you be? #r4today

At this point you either believe anyone has the right to seek protection from persecution in a place where they feel safe, and travel to get there, or you don't.

I did try to explain why some refugees try to reach the UK from France in this video #r4today

I also wrote about it. Top tip: it has nothing to do with France having a tougher system for refugees or for undocumented migrants than us. The truth is, most migrants have no idea what the policy is.

Making our system worse will not stop people moving
greenworld.org.uk/article/why-ar…

Anyway, you either buy that or you don't, but more importantly, I've written about how the new system for denying asylum to anyone who might have passed through another safe country here.

Patel is out of her depth & her new system is unworkable #r4today

https://twitter.com/ZoeJardiniere/status/1372456226672545794

Asylum claims are down by 40% this year. The system is indeed, as Patel says, collapsing but Why?
Sheer cruelty and incompetence.

Overall numbers have been low & steady for two decades. This should be manageable.
But the backlog has grown every year since 2018 #r4today

No one opposes bringing in women & kids from refugee camps. But when the Home Secretary cannot give even the vaguest outline of what safe and legal routes will actually look like, it sounds a lot like demonisation of most refugees with no real alternative offered #r4today

The asylum system is dysfunctional because it wrongly doubts asylum seekers a lot too often. The appeals system is full because asylum seekers WIN their appeals when a judge who knows the law examines the Home Office caseworkers' decisions. #r4today

If Patel's Home Office wanted a more streamlined and effective asylum system, they would abandon their culture of disbelief which keeps asylum seekers trapped in appeals & misery for years.

Look for how you can protect people, not how you can deny them #r4today

But Patel does NOT want a streamlined and efficient asylum system.
She wants permanent crisis. She wants headlines about illegality & smugglers. As long as her solutions do nothing to address the real issues she can play to her base.
She wants a mess & she's got it. #r4today

Patel hasn't had the good time she was expecting across #r4today and the rest of the media today.

She struggled to maintain her line that she's somehow the moral actor when faced with a well-briefed interviewer who rightly put responsibility for the failed asylum system on her.

There are a couple of really important points that weren't covered in this interview, so forgive me as I draw out my thread a little further, to make a couple more vital points:

Raising penalties for smuggling to life imprisonment would be one thing, if we had a shred of confidence she knew what a smuggler is.

She imprisons the asylum seekers themselves, desperate people who have their hand on the tiller of a dinghy crossing the sea are called smugglers

The Home Secretary is the one wasting public money and clogging up the courts banging up one person arbitrarily chosen off the Channel boats each time and calling it tackling smuggling, when they are seeking asylum exactly the same as the rest. What a circus.

Patel wants to convince us that people are abusing the system for protecting victims of modern slavery to attempt to stay in the UK, but the figures she herself relies on to make that point show 89% of people applying ARE recognised as victims. Hardly large-scale abuse 🤔

This entire process is about creating bogeymen who don't exist.

Refugees who are pushing to the front of a non-existent queue, victims of slavery who ought to be criminalised instead, lawyers who dare to use the law to defend their clients... Don't buy it.

She inherited a broken system and has gone about dismantling it as much further as she possibly can.

The dysfunction in the Home Office, the backlogs, the bad and wrong decisions, the lost court cases for discrimination, the lessons not learned, is all ON HER.

Priti Patel is unfit for office. No answer to how she will actually create fair and legal routes for asylum seekers. Has no care for the wellbeing of the people who are her department's responsibility.

She is incompetent and vindictive. Her Bill when it comes must be thrown out.

I got too het up about Patel being awful that I forgot to say it was brilliant to hear from the wonderful @hassan_akkad before her.

And credit, for ONCE, to #r4today - starting a discussion about refugee rights by TALKING TO A REFUGEE

Have to say I don't think Patel was prepared to follow an actual refugee NHS worker who would have been victimised by her proposed new system!
Nor was she expecting to have the Refugee Convention quoted at her!

Heartfelt well done to those behind the scenes briefing folks, too.