UK cabinet split over EU plans to expand sea search and rescue of migrants
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Version 0 of 1. David Cameron has been facing strong opposition from the home secretary, Theresa May, and the foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, to his plans to support expansion of search and rescue operations at Thursday’s European summit on the plight of migrants crossing the Mediterranean. May and Hammond were on Wednesday said not to be budging from their belief that such rescue operations actually create a “pull factor” and lead to more deaths by encouraging more migrants to risk the dangerous sea crossing. “May is still holding out for a deterrent approach. She wants to focus on action against the traffickers and a rapid returns programme,” one Brussels source told the Guardian. “May and Hammond have been pushing back, partly for face-saving reasons, given that they were so involved in the initial decision last October to demand an immediate withdrawal of the Italian Mare Nostrum [rescue operation],” said another source. Cameron is understood to have shifted his position earlier this week as the extensive media coverage convinced Downing Street and Tory election strategists that voters see the tragedy in the Mediterranean as a humanitarian crisis rather than an immigration issue. He is now expected to override the objections of his home secretary and foreign secretary. “He will have to bump them into it,” said one source. Although Cameron is expected to agree to bigger rescue operations at the EU summit, he is also expected to “dig deep” to avoid any specific commitment to Britain taking a quota of refugees under any new resettlement system that is part of the 10-point package to be debated at the summit. The UK is, however, understood to be prepared to provide Royal Navy ships to help the proposed “search and destroy” operation against smugglers’ boats. On Monday, the prime minister spoke of needing “an element of search and rescue” in any replacement for the small-scale EU Triton coastguard operation that is designed to provide border surveillance within 30 miles of the Italian coast. The same day, meetings of EU ministers, at which May and Hammond represented Britain, agreed to double funding for Triton and widen its operational area, but they explicitly did not extend its remit to large-scale search and rescue. However, Cameron has since responded to widespread pressure, including from another Tory leadership hopeful, Boris Johnson, for a much more expansive search and rescue effort. On Wednesday morning he made clear for the first time that he did not think the decision to replace Mare Nostrum with Triton had worked. “It was a decision that was made by the EU and Italy. They found at some stage it did look like more people were taking to boats. So they, the EU, decided to end that policy and have a coastguard policy. That hasn’t worked either. “Now we need to make sure we do more to save lives. That will involve more search and rescue, and there is a contribution I’m sure we can make to that. But that alone won’t be enough. We’ve got to go after the real causes of the problem,” Cameron told ITV’s This Morning. He is believed to have faced strong opposition from May and Hammond over what scale of search and rescue operations Britain should be prepared to back at the summit on Thursday. May said on Monday that her priorities were: action against the smugglers, a rapid returns programme, and action in transit and source countries to prevent the flow of migrants and refugees to the boats in the first place. Hammond said anecdotal evidence showed that planned rescue operations were making the problem worse. “When we talked to people who had been rescued they were under the impression that they could get on an unseaworthy vessel and they would be picked up within hours ... We do not want people to feel they are willing to embark on unseaworthy vessels to take risks that are simply not sensible to take,” he said. The foreign secretary said the principal challenge was to shut down the trafficking routes. “If you have people falling off a cliff you do not spend all your resources picking them up at the bottom of the cliff, you build a fence at the top of the cliff,” he told the BBC. Labour leader Ed Miliband called for the Mare Nostrum operation to be restarted. He said: “It was wrong to cancel the search-and-rescue operation last November and it should be restarted. “There is no trade-off between controlling immigration, showing basic humanity and living up to our moral responsibilities as a country. That reflects the values of the British people. If I was prime minister I would be going to that conference tomorrow and saying restart the search-and-rescue.” |