BRITAIN’S incoherent, counterproductive and needlessly cruel border control policy has resulted in a spiralling increase in death and violence. The one thing it has failed to do is deter small boat arrivals.

The Humans for Rights Network has assembled a compelling collection of reports from two dozen human rights organisations, operating in both Britain and France, that detail alarming evidence from asylum-seekers, aid workers and medics.

In a move which parallels the European Union’s policy of funding the Libyan state and coastguard authorities to intercept small boats crossing the Mediterranean, Britain is spending millions in funding French police and border control authorities to perform the same operation across the English Channel.

While the notoriously violent French police are, as yet, not violent enough to match the excesses of the jihadists who make up the Libyan state apparatus, they are brutal enough.

Since the Nato powers, US, Britain and France bombed Libya to smithereens — and British intelligence enabled the same jihadists responsible for the Manchester bombing to take power — the Mediterranean has seen an escalation of violence along the EU frontier.

Both the Labour government and the competing parties of Britain’s presently disunited capitalist class present small boat arrivals as the central question of immigration policy.

In fact, immigration overall is substantially down and while small boats arrivals are largely seasonal, asylum-seekers are wilfully confused with migrants in general.

Asylum-seekers, who by definition are compelled to use unorthodox routes to reach Britain, are in a different category to routine migration into Britain and are a very small part of immigration overall.

The public perception of immigration is greatly distorted by the tendentious framing of the issue by both media and the main parties of capitalist continuity.

In fact, if safe routes to entry for genuine asylum-seekers were instituted, the flow could be rationally managed and the criminal gangs, which are in fact the creation of EU and British government policy, would be out of business.

Once the idea gains ground among the British public that asylum-seekers arriving in small boats are a minor part of the migratory flow to Britain, it will be possible for a more rational discussion to take place about what should be a rational immigration policy.

At present the question is posed as a contradiction between a strong border policy, essentially a policing problem, versus the ultra-liberal notion of open borders. The former is represented by the media, and a right wing more interested in hyperbole than reason, as the totality of the question.

At the same time, woolly liberal opinion — sometimes shot through with an holier-than-thou ultra leftism — is wilfully ignorant of the ways in which the imperialist-induced contemporary capitalist labour market functions.

Imperial Britain traditionally relies on denuding its former colonies of their skilled labour to fill gaps in the labour market that a profit-hungry ruling class finds this more congenial than actually skilling up the existing labour force, investing sufficiently in labour efficient technology and recasting our economy for the 21st century.

A large proportion of incoming migrants are English-speaking foreign students attracted by our well-established higher education system and another tranche are migrant workers from many parts of the world, and especially Europe, actively recruited by employers and whose entry is sanctioned and facilitated by government.

A rational and progressive immigration policy should be actively anti-racist, cognisant of the debt we owe to colonial peoples, grounded in fair employment practices, balanced with a radical creation of a people-centred programme of skills training and linked to a progressive foreign policy.