Interestingly, however, this bad temper wasn’t aimed at us. Arrival countries like Italy and Greece were angry that they were being inundated. The places the immigrants were being sent on to, like Germany and France, were furious that these countries were flouting Dublin. All these western European countries were angry with eastern European countries, which didn’t want to share solidarity and take migrants when talk of a quota began. And all the while I was thanking my stars that Britain wasn’t in Schengen, and I could legitimately insist that we would do our bit, including financially, but would play no part in any quota.
The EU got itself off the hook by saying it was going to introduce a relocation programme for 40,000 people. That was a cursory contribution – equivalent to about four weeks of arrivals. But it had to be delivered, and the summit went on into the night. There was arguing and shouting; some people lost it completely. The atmosphere was terrible. At the end of a very long session, I brokered a compromise between the two sides. Protected by not being in Schengen and by the consistency of my views, I drafted the wording for a voluntary scheme and not a mandatory quota. The European foreign affairs representative, Federica Mogherini, declared in front of everyone: ‘Last night, David, you saved Europe.’ Not a sentiment I heard very often.
More bitterness was to follow in September, when Angela Merkel forced a quota plan for the resettlement of 120,000 migrants through a meeting of European interior ministers. Consensus was impossible, because the eastern European countries would vote against the measure, and effectively veto it, so the EU powers that be decided that instead of the usual requirement for unanimity, the decision would be made by qualified majority, and the doubters simply outvoted. Ultimately it was futile, because the eastern European countries which were now obliged to accept this new plan simply announced that they would ignore it, and so they did.
Things were precarious enough, but a couple of months later a single decision was to change everything. On 21 August 2015, Merkel suspended the Dublin Regulation for Syrians. Migrants no longer had to register for asylum in the country of first arrival. ‘Wir schaffen das,’ she told the German people – ‘We can do this.’ But to all those immigrants who had arrived in Hungary, Italy and Greece, it meant ‘Come to Germany.’ To those waiting to board boats around the world, it meant ‘Go ahead and make that journey to Europe.’ Huge numbers of migrants headed towards Germany, and on 5 September Merkel effectively opened her country’s borders to the influx. The step-by-step chancellor had taken a giant leap – and I was convinced it would prove disastrous.
Yet I understood why she had done it. I had convinced myself that the most compassionate thing in the long term was to discourage people from making the journey. But the images of those who did, and those who suffered along the way, made me want to do more to help.
I also knew how much Merkel’s hinterland influenced her mentality. She grew up in the wake of the Second World War, when shame hung over her country. Brought up in East Germany, she loathed borders and division. How tempting to cast off the associations and mistakes of the past and make a big, generous gesture.
However, I suspected that the biggest factor was her recent appearance on the German equivalent of Question Time. A young Palestinian girl had asked what would happen to refugees from her country. Germany couldn’t accommodate all Palestinians, Merkel told her. The girl sobbed, Merkel comforted her, and the clips of her looking awkward and heartless went viral. I suspected it was this moment, rather than the memories of East German checkpoints, that inspired her final decision.
It is easy to criticise Merkel’s action, but I have every sympathy with how a moment like that might have changed her approach. It was only a week later that the picture of Alan Kurdi was published, and I found myself in a situation where the mood had shifted, and something had to change. The pressure on me was great. A ‘Refugees Welcome’ march soon snaked past Downing Street – and they had a point. We have a proud history as a sanctuary for the persecuted. From French Huguenots to Holocaust survivors to Ugandan Asians, people have made Britain their home, and made it the most successful multiracial democracy on earth.
I found myself caught between the increasingly polarised politics that have come to characterise our age. Opinions printed in the Daily Mail would have you believe that migrants were all men, predominantly from outside Syria, and very often criminals or terrorists. None should be allowed into Britain. Opposing this were arguments that all migrants were Alan Kurdis, and everyone should be allowed to settle here. Two rival petitions exemplified this divide, with nearly half a million people demanding that the UK ‘accept more asylum seekers and increase support for refugee migrants in the UK’, while the same number signed another demanding that all immigration be stopped until the defeat of ISIS.
The truth was somewhere in between. The migrants were 72 per cent male. The second-highest number were Afghans and the third-highest were Iraqis, fleeing ISIS. A large number of the people we took in weren’t Syrian children, but Afghani teenagers. But by and large they were Syrians. Many were families. People wouldn’t make the potentially deadly journey unless they were desperate. We couldn’t do everything – but we could do something.
Unlike Merkel, I was determined to keep my head. Moderation was key. I wanted us to take people, but to do so in a way that didn’t entice more to make the perilous journey. Crucially, I simply didn’t see the point of taking people from inside the EU, because they were safe already. If we were going to take refugees, they had to be from the camps.
We were ahead of the game on this. In 2014 we took the decision to establish the first Syrian Vulnerable Persons Scheme. Led by my foreign affairs private secretary Nigel Casey and developed with the UNHCR, it fitted with our belief that while the best option was for the vast majority of refugees to stay in the region, there was a small number of people – orphans, women and children at risk of sexual violence – for whom asylum in the West was right. When the migration crisis hit in mid-2015, and public, political and international pressure to respond rose, we were ready.
The question was how many we would take. We came up with the number 20,000, to which I added the words ‘over the rest of this Parliament’. I knew that saying ‘20,000 now’ would invite calls for 30,000 next year, 40,000 the year after, and so on. There was no right number; we just needed to demonstrate warmth and generosity, and at the same time try to solve the fundamental problem.
Meanwhile, all the problems I envisaged from ‘Wir schaffen das’ were coming to pass. Within weeks, 13,000 people were arriving in Germany every day. Nearly a million came that year. The orderly registration of arrivals didn’t happen, and the German state effectively lost control. At the same time, Italy, Greece and Hungary were struggling to cope with the influx. Eight thousand people arrived on the Aegean islands in a single day, all ready to take up their personal invitation from Angela Merkel.
What happened next was inevitable. From Croatia to Slovenia to Austria, and later in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Belgium, the borders started to go up across Europe. Even Germany imposed border controls, and the shine came off the welcoming culture – Willkommenskultur – when gangs of migrants attacked women among the crowds celebrating New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne.
You develop strange, shifting alliances in politics, and I found myself working on aspects of this issue with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Bulgaria’s Boyko Borisov – increasingly being called ‘the bad boys of the EU’. Orbán’s populism was not mine, and I worried about the direction he was going in and the language he was using. He knew that, but we realised there were, within limits, certain things we could achieve together.
Hungary and Bulgaria were on the outer edge of the EU, and therefore on the front line of the migrant crisis. Yet they’d been effectively abandoned by the failed EU border-policing operation, Frontex, which lacked money and personnel. Therefore they’d taken matters into their own hands. Orbán built a fence
on Hungary’s border with Serbia and later on that with Croatia, and the flow of migrants to his country stopped. As has been mentioned, Bulgaria has both a sea border and a land border with Turkey, but by building a fence, Borisov kept the masses out of Bulgaria.
I visited Bulgaria at the end of the year – the first British PM to go to the country in sixteen years. I had promised some second-hand British Army Land Rovers to police the border, and in the event we were able to send forty. That evening, Borisov and I dined at a restaurant up a Balkan mountain, and were treated to some authentically Bulgarian entertainment – Balkan dancing and singing, followed by shaman figures who walked across red-hot embers, holding icons of favourite saints.
Meanwhile, the initial EU response was a total failure. It had been intended that ‘hotspots’ would be set up in Greece and Italy, where people could be properly processed, fingerprinted and checked, but despite repeated announcements, almost nothing happened. These hotspots were supposed to be combined with a relocation scheme to spread 120,000 people around the continent, but that also failed. By Christmas 2015, Britain had settled one thousand of our promised 20,000 – which was more than all the countries signed up to the EU’s resettlement quota put together. (Indeed, by the end of 2017 Britain had managed to take 10,000 refugees, compared with only 28,000 across the whole of Schengen. Huge credit must go to Richard Harrington, who I made minister for Syrian refugees. He ran an excellent programme to resettle thousands of these vulnerable people, and they are doing well here.)
Britain continued plugging away, trying to prevent people from making the deadly journeys and to keep them close to home. Working with the World Bank and others, we persuaded the Turks and the Jordanians to grant work permits to refugees. We poured massive sums into Lebanon and Jordan, holding an event at Davos with Jordan’s Queen Rania in January 2016 to persuade investors to create jobs in the special economic zone set up in her country. I announced that we would send £20 million in UK aid to help fund Lebanon’s overstretched school system. Then there was the historic Syria Conference.
This was 0.7 per cent in action. It didn’t just keep people safe, secure, and give them some semblance of a future. It made Britain a leading voice in the EU on the response, and showed an alternative – a better alternative – to simply taking more and more people and continuing the cycle.
And then, finally, my appeals to stop the problem upstream were heeded. It turned out to be a game-changer.
On 18 March 2016, the European Council agreed to a deal with Turkey to stop further migration. Every boat that reached the Greek islands would be sent back to Turkey. And for every Syrian returned to Turkey, one would be taken from the camps and resettled in the Schengen countries. In return, the EU would pay Turkey €6 billion, and would speed up plans for visa-free travel for Turks to the EU.
The terms of the deal were easy to parody as a merry-go-round, but it was entirely reasonable. We needed to ‘turn back the boats’ in order to stop more people coming, and this agreement did just that. The cash payments were merited – after all, Turkey was looking after 2.5 million migrants. Visa-free travel wasn’t the same as the right to work or settle. And, most importantly, it only applied to Schengen countries, not the UK. More to the point – the deal worked. The numbers leaving Turkey for Greece collapsed from around 3,000 a day to fewer than one hundred. As well as that, working with African countries to prevent migration across the Sahara, improving policing and cracking down on people-smuggling, eventually yielded real results. In 2015, over 150,000 people crossed the central Mediterranean illegally. In 2018, just 23,000 did so.
Of course, that did not mean the problem was solved. Hundreds of thousands of migrants remained on the move – they still do. And, tragically, they still die. This proves that the refugee system needs to change completely. The thesis put forward by Oxford University economist Sir Paul Collier, who became something of a guru for me on development issues, is, I believe, the correct one. The best way of supporting people is in neighbouring countries, where they can work, remain close to home, and from which they can return when it is safe to do so.
As for Britain, the crisis proved to me once again that being inside the EU, with our special status, was absolutely to our advantage. Just as we had the single market but not the single currency, so we had influence over migration issues in Europe without having open borders. On this issue – of migrants coming to the continent from outside the EU – leaving would be of no benefit whatsoever. Many would still choose the UK as their eventual destination. Departing the EU wouldn’t help us close or strengthen our borders, but it would mean having no say about how the rest of the EU could deal with this issue more effectively.
We were largely insulated from the refugee exodus, as we were able legitimately to argue that we should be exempt from relocation schemes. This enabled us to sort out problems like the security of the English Channel and to push our own agenda with the Turkey deal. If anything, the crisis demonstrated how much control we did have over our borders. It also demonstrated how much sway we had within the EU. Indeed, the comprehensive approach I pushed in all those meetings eventually became EU policy, and is now received wisdom.
The European migration crisis wasn’t the same as our immigration problem, which was never economic migrants or asylum seekers arriving en masse. We had a small but significant problem of illegal entry – people clinging to trains or climbing into the back of lorries – but this was dwarfed by people from outside the EU coming legally, and overstaying on visitor and student visas. And, of course, by people from inside the EU coming in large numbers because of jobs and benefits, and because of free movement without transitional controls.
There is a lesson in the fact that those countries that have taken the largest numbers of refugees – Germany, France, Sweden, Italy – have seen the biggest rise of the far right. But the crisis did hit us, and brought a massive boost to those on the right, and particularly to those campaigning against EU membership. People talk about migration and asylum interchangeably, and UKIP deliberately conflated the asylum crisis with the European issue.
There are so many ‘should-have-dones’ in politics, and this is one of my biggest. I should have done far more to demonstrate that our approach was different to Merkel’s. That we were in a completely different position. That our special status of being in the EU but not in Schengen gave us the best possible insulation from the crisis.
I didn’t. And that would clear the way for a single, defining image – a poster, released less than two weeks before the day of the EU referendum vote, looking suspiciously similar to Nazi propaganda, with the words ‘Breaking Point’. Behind it was a long line of male migrants trudging across the Croatia–Slovenia border. ‘The EU has failed us all’, said the strapline. The reality: Britain was largely immune from the EU’s failures. The perception: all these people were on their way to Britain. The result: a blow to the campaign to remain in the European Union that might have proved decisive.
As well as making frequent visits to European capitals, I was looking beyond the continent to strengthen our international alliances. In fact, now I had been re-elected with a majority, leaders were keen to come to me.
A Chinese president hadn’t been to Britain in a decade. But in October 2015, Xi Jinping made a visit that would mark a high point in our countries’ relationship, with greater trade, investment, tourism and cooperation than ever before.
On these visits you’re always trying to come up with ‘moments’ that might embody your message. With the Chinese, every detail has to be carefully negotiated, usually weeks in advance. We wanted to demonstrate that the hard work that had gone into the relationship meant there was a genuine dialogue. They wanted to show that Xi was a man of the people. So I suggested that he should come with me to have fish and chips and a pint at the Plough, near Chequers. To our surprise, the Chinese agreed.
Though there were cameras snapping away and advis
ers buzzing around us, it was a chance for me to spend some time with Xi. He has a confident and bullish exterior – he sees himself very much as the big leader, in the mould of Mao and Deng, and projects that image – but behind the scenes I found him reflective and thoughtful. And the pub was a hit. In fact, he enjoyed it so much that a group of Chinese investors later bought the Plough, and plans to launch a chain called ‘The Prime Minister’s Pub’ across China.
Hot on Xi’s heels came the new Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. There were several ‘moments’, including the largest-ever gathering of the Indian diaspora in the UK at Wembley Stadium. Before introducing Modi I told the 60,000-strong crowd that I envisaged a British-Indian entering 10 Downing Street as prime minister one day. The roar of approval was incredible. And as Modi and I hugged on stage, I hoped that this small gesture, like clinking glasses with Xi, would be a signal of the open-armed eagerness with which Britain approached the world.
On 25 November a very personal tragedy struck at the heart of No. 10. At the time when he’d normally be by my side, helping me prepare for PMQs, I received the terrible news that Chris Martin had died of cancer. In the Commons that day his seat in the officials’ box was left empty, and I paid tribute to the man who was somewhere between a father and a brother to us all. I described him as ‘my Bernard’, after one of the central characters in Yes, Prime Minister. He had been a central character in my premiership – the perfect PPS.
30 November would be a significant day in the life of our planet, as 160 countries assembled in Paris for the UN Climate Change Conference. They would strike a momentous agreement to limit global warming to less than two degrees above pre-industrial levels. After years of failure, from Kyoto to Copenhagen, it was the most significant step we’d ever taken towards saving the earth, and it cemented our status as Britain’s greenest-ever government.
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