November is the cruellest month: The scandal of deaths in the Channel

This summer, the government was urged to make safe passage and legal routes to the UK for people fleeing Afghanistan.

Labour’s Lisa Nandy warned that the government dragging its feet on this would cost lives.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson responded by promising to “move heaven and earth” to get fleeing Afghans to safety in the UK.

He promised an Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme to take 5000 people this year and 20,000 in the long-term.

However, just this week, the government admitted that the Afghan resettlement scheme still hasn’t been created. In Parliament this week it emerged that Victoria Atkins, the minister in charge of the programme, has no timescale in place even to begin bringing Afghans to safety in the UK.

A few days ago, an Afghan soldier who worked with British forces drowned trying to reach the UK.

He was one of over thirty people, including children, who tragically lost their lives whilst attempting to cross the English Channel in order to seek asylum in the UK.

You might think that such a tragedy would be a turning point for the government to change its approach. But they have doubled down on the approach which led to these deaths.

They know that their current set-up pushes asylum seekers into the arms of people smugglers and traffickers. But they don’t care enough to make credible attempts to change this.

The more the government tries to put up barriers, the more dangerous the journeys for asylum seekers become.

Travelling many miles across the sea in a small dinghy, crammed full of people, knowing it could well be the last thing you ever do, is a terrifying prospect.

But for people coming to the UK to seek asylum after fleeing unimaginable horror – such as life under the Taliban – it is their only option.

There are currently no safe routes by which people seeking asylum can reach the UK. This fuels business for people smugglers. Protecting people from these smugglers starts by providing meaningful alternatives to reach the UK – safe passage and legal routes. It sounds obvious because it is.

But apparently too difficult a solution for a Tory Government which has built political power on rhetoric and policies which demonise asylum seekers, migrants, and even black British citizens, as demonstrated by the Windrush Scandal.

We have had years of headlines drip-fed from the Home Secretary’s office reporting that she has considered ideas for border policy such as using nets to stall the boats crossing the channel, constructing floating walls in the sea to block them, and using a wave machine to physically push them away from UK shores.

You only have to look at the government’s Nationality and Borders Bill, which the Home Office is being taken to court for possibly breaching international and human rights law if it makes its way onto the statute book.