Derek Wilson

The EU Acted. Hungary Acted. The US Acted. Britain Signed Hotel Contracts Until 2039. Yesterday the European Parliament voted 418 to 218 to pass the strictest returns legislation in EU history. The lead negotiator described it as the final missing piece of Europe's migration system. After almost twenty years of standstill, he said, Europe finally has effective return measures. The vote followed the Chișinău Declaration of 15 May, signed by all 46 Council of Europe member states, pushing back against the European Court of Human Rights' increasingly expansive interpretation of migration law. Europe's governments, operating inside the ECHR framework, have decided they have had enough of judicial overreach. They are acting anyway. Britain's removal rate for illegal arrivals stands at 4%. The EU's removal rate, the number so catastrophically low it triggered yesterday's emergency legislation, stands at 20%. Britain is removing at one fifth the rate of a system the EU itself just declared broken beyond tolerance. While announcing it wants to stop the boats, the Home Office has signed accommodation contracts for asylum seekers running until 2039. A government that intends to remove people does not contract for 15 years of housing them. The standard explanation is the ECHR. Ministers have cited it for years as the primary obstacle to removal, the external constraint that ties Britain's hands regardless of political will. It is worth examining that claim against the Court's own published data. Of more than 430,000 applications processed by the ECHR in the past decade, fewer than 2% concerned immigration. Of those, over 92% were dismissed. Fewer than 450 cases, one in every thousand applications to the Court, resulted in a finding of human rights violation on immigration grounds. The obstacle is not in Strasbourg. It is in Chancery Lane. The domestic immigration tribunal system, staffed in part by judges whose documented backgrounds lie in open-borders advocacy, produces rulings that no democratically elected parliament ever intended and that the ECHR itself would not require. And the institutional machinery surrounding it ensures that challenging any of this carries consequences. A new Islamophobia definition, opposed by the government's own former anti-extremism adviser and by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, is being embedded across every school, hospital, broadcaster and public body in the country. Two-tier policing, documented in Hampshire's own Race Action Plan and in the College of Policing's guidance, conditions officers to treat a racism accusation as the primary fact requiring response. The framework does not just permit the embedding of mass migration. It is designed to make objecting to it a disciplinary matter. The EU has now demonstrated, within the ECHR framework, that effective returns legislation is achievable. Hungary has demonstrated that a 4% removal rate is a political choice, not a legal inevitability. The United States has demonstrated that border crossings can be reduced from 1.6 million to under 240,000 within months of a government deciding to act. Every external constraint Britain's government cites as the reason it cannot act has now been dismantled by other governments operating under comparable or identical legal obligations. Mass immigration is not an act of nature managed by people smugglers. It is a policy choice sustained by successive governments across thirty years, maintained by an institutional framework that classifies concern about it as extremism, and defended by a legal excuse that the EU just voted 418 to 218 to stop hiding behind. The smugglers did not build this system. The government did. Yesterday, 418 members of the European Parliament decided they had had enough of pretending otherwise. Britain's government has not. "Mass immigration is not an act of nature managed by people smugglers. It is a policy choice sustained by successive governments across thirty years"