Braverman’s chance to confound the cynics

IN the real world – that workaday place beyond the Westminster bubble – which of the following is more important?

That Home Secretary Suella Braverman sent some official documents from her government email to her personal account in breach of ministerial guidelines.

Or that hundreds of migrants a day are entering Britain illegally, bringing the asylum system to its knees, leading to dangerous overcrowding at processing centres and overwhelming the available housing and hotel accommodation.

We don’t need an opinion poll to tell us the answer. While the political class obsesses over the mind-numbing minutiae of Mrs Braverman’s online conduct, a massive crisis is unfolding.

Tackling the scale of the migrant influx would challenge any Home Secretary. Mrs Braverman has the added burden of being undermined by her own officials, hounded by the liberal Left and briefed against by malicious Tory colleagues.

Then there is her sanctimonious Labour shadow, Yvette Cooper. In priggish tones she scolds Mrs Braverman for not getting a grip on the Channel crisis.

Yet she was a key member of the Blair/ Brown government which deliberately encouraged mass immigration in order to ‘rub the Right’s noses in diversity’. Today’s problems are a direct legacy of that time.

And what is her solution now? Better liaison with the French (good luck with that!), stronger enforcement against traffickers (because no one has thought of it before) and speeding up the asylum process (which Mr Blair’s human rights legislation has made fiendishly difficult).

If anyone embodies Labour’s hypocrisy and paucity of ideas, it’s Miss Cooper – good at carping from the sidelines but, when it comes to solutions, nothing to contribute.

Mrs Braverman gave a spirited Commons performance yesterday, saying she would not shrink from radical action, including changing the law to counter this ‘invasion’.

‘Illegal migration is out of control and too many people are more interested in playing political parlour games, covering up the truth, than solving the problem,’ she said.

Of course migrants must be treated with respect and overcrowding at the Manston centre is deeply troubling. But they are arriving in such numbers that housing is a serious problem.

Even when hotel accommodation is identified or new centres proposed, growing numbers of councils – including Labour ones – are blocking them on the grounds their communities would be disrupted.

Miss Cooper once volunteered to take refugees into her home – but then found she couldn’t. Perhaps she could make up for that now by proposing a large facility for asylum seekers in her marginal West Yorkshire constituency.

The debate has centred in recent days on what to do with Channel migrants once they are here. Mrs Braverman rightly points out that the greater imperative is to reduce the numbers arriving.

While some may have originally fled persecution, they are coming here from France – hardly an oppressive state. One in three is from Albania, attracted by employment and welfare opportunities here. Such economic migrants and the gangs who traffic them will be deterred only when there is a realistic possibility they will intercepted and sent back.

Yes, better cooperation with France and tougher enforcement will help but claims must be dealt with more quickly and failed asylum seekers routinely deported.

It will take steely political will to take on the migration lobby. Whether Mrs Braverman can succeed where others failed remains to be seen.

But the potential rewards of solving, or at least alleviating this crisis are huge. It could mean the difference between winning and losing the next election.