Immigration and asylum is significantly less important to younger UK voters than their elders. It does not even feature amongst younger peoples’ “Top 5” issues (I discussed this in a previous post on UK Youth Issues in June, sorry.)

However, when conflated with the “Small Boats” crisis, immigration has become the most incendiary issue in British politics in 2025. Demonstrations and counter-protests at “asylum hotels”, the government’s longer-term “commitment” to end the use of hotels (with a ridiculously tin-eared deadline of 2029), the still-rising illegal small boat arrivals belying the Government’s hapless interview “line” that arrivals are “coming under control”, the dawning realisation that the UK received 1.7million net migrants in the five years from 2020 to 2024 (and the equally pointed realisation that this seems to have, at best, done absolutely nothing for the UK economy) have created a seething broth of immigration worries.

In to this spicy broth, the major incumbent political parties have injected a risible mix of panic, incompetence, fantastical thinking, procrastination and diversion. No surprise then that REFORM have moved to 30% of the predicted popular vote for the first time.

So, in these torrid circumstances I was overjoyed to find a VOICE OF REASON in no more surprising a place than the BBC’s Radio 4 PM programme last Wednesday. Most disconcerting. Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, KC, the former Director of Public Prosecutions and co-founder of the impeccably left-wing human rights-focused Matrix Chambers where Lord Hermer KC, the current Attorney-General, was also Head of Chambers prior to his “elevation”, was scheduled to discuss the prosecution of supporters of Palestine Action with Evan Davies.

For posterity, however, I made a transcript! (My reddening only for emphasis.)

Lord Macdonald: “I think some people feel, I mean Lord Wolfson the Shadow Attorney General, who is a very remarkable lawyer, certainly feels that in some senses now the courts are straying into making law a little bit too often and merely interpreting it not as much as they should be.

I think there is a sense in which there is political frustration and there has particularly been political frustration around the deportation of migrants and foreign criminals because of the way courts have been interpreting Article 8 of the European Convention, the right to family life, in a very expansive way. We know that European governments are looking at this and want to try to narrow interpretations of Article 8 so that it is easier to deport people and I think our government will do the same.

There is one point I do want to make: that the rise of populism around the world is fuelled, I think, essentially by two things. One has been the disadvantage that many people suffered through globalisation and this was mainly working-class communities who lost jobs and the other is migration and mass migration. These two things are bringing us authoritarianism and authoritarian governments around the world, in every continent and I think we have to look at some of the more basic conventions, the Refugee Convention, for example, which says that anyone who has a well-founded fear of persecution at home must be granted asylum.

That would include probably hundreds of millions of people. When that convention was entered into, it was thought there were about two million people who came into that category and they were all within Europe. Now we live in a smaller world, travel is easier, social media makes it easy to plan, we have organised gangs, running these businesses and probably hundreds of millions of people, certainly tens of millions of people who qualify.

I think we need to look at some of these fundamental, international instruments, which have outlived their usefulness because they were meant and drafted for another age and unless we deal with the disadvantage which globalisation has caused, unless we deal with mass migration, we are going to see increasing levels of authoritarian governments around the world.”

Evan Davies: “It is really interesting you say that, because it sounds as though you would think there is a bit of a consensus in Europe, that perhaps the rules need to be tightened up a bit and they are kind of… well, I think you call it an expansive interpretation of the right to a family life. That needs to be curtailed a bit and the politicians need to be given a bit more leeway to do stuff if they feel they need to do it.”

Lord Macdonald: “Yes, I do think that and I think that it is particularly a challenge for left of centre government, such as our own, because they are the ones who are going to get it in the neck, if these issues of migration are not solved. This is obviously something that Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney are extremely concerned about. This issue is not going to be resolved by “smashing the gangs” rhetoric. It is not going to be solved by returning 10 or 20 or 30 people a month to France under some swap arrangement. We have to look at the entire basis upon which people are able to claim asylum, people who are in reality economic migrants, can very often claim that status, which is described under the Refugee Convention as a well-founded fear of persecution at home. Anyone who comes from Syria, anyone who comes from Russia, anyone who comes from a country where political persecution is endemic, can make that claim, even if in reality, they are an economic migrant. So: we need some toughening of the language, we need some toughening of the process.”

Sensible, intelligent, practical, so his view can’t possibly be allowed to percolate to the top of the spicy broth of our incumbent parties incompetent immigration failures surely. Give that man a peerage. Oh….