ALAN MENDOZA: Leniency should not be confused with compassion - the result will be more boat deaths

One only has to recall the tragic deaths of six migrants, when their boat sank off the coast of France last weekend, to understand why there is nothing compassionate about a lenient approach to illegal immigration.

On the contrary, such enfeeblement encourages ever greater numbers to make the dangerous crossing of the Channel, gives more power to the people smugglers, undermines public faith in the legal immigration system and promotes mass injustice by rewarding queue-jumpers armed with muscle and cash.

Real fairness and humanity lie in the creation of well-managed border controls, along with access to settlement for genuine refugees. But that is precisely what Britain does not have at present.

Official policy is rapidly collapsing into farce and failure, with more than 100,000 people having crossed the Channel in small boats since January 2018.

What makes the official approach towards the soaring illegal influx so disturbing is the scale of the institutionalised feebleness, particularly from the Home Office. The very department that is meant to be the guardian of our national integrity acts like a cheerleader for an open-door stance, so soft is its scrutiny of asylum claims, and so poor is its management.

Anarchy flourishes in such an environment, with the kind of grim consequences that could be seen off the coast of Calais last weekend. Nothing encapsulates the lack of rigour within the British state more shockingly than the pages of guidance issued to asylum caseworkers.

Obtained by this newspaper, these incriminating documents betray an impulse to collude with asylum seekers, no matter how unconvincing their tales. Indeed, the destructive stench of the fashionable politically correct agenda hangs over this advice. In one glaring example, caseworkers are told that even lies perpetrated by claimants should not be used against them. On the contrary, officials must give 'a chance' to the applicants 'to explain any inconsistencies in their account'.

Just as paralysing are the warnings to avoid scepticism or lines of questioning that the asylum seeker may find traumatic. In line with modern woke ideology, feelings count more than facts, while expressing doubt about someone's version of their 'lived experience' – if they come from a minority group – is in itself a form of oppression. So if claimants say they are fleeing persecution because they are gay, that assertion has to be accepted without the need to produce any evidence.

This guidance is the fruit of a metropolitan culture that is fixated by diversity, and indifferent to the concept of nationhood. The odds are overwhelmingly stacked in favour of asylum seekers because, at heart, the senior ranks of the Home Office believe in free movement. Judging by the numbers, it seems to me they do not want migrant scrutiny, preferring Britain to be a soft touch. That is why 73 per cent of asylum claims were approved in the year to March 2023, a massive increase from 2004 when 88 per cent of applications were rejected.

Real deterrence appears to have long since ceased to be a Home Office objective. The lack of rigour in its guidance to caseworkers is a further incentive to dodgy lawyers who make a fortune from peddling false claims.

Even more worryingly, the seeming absence of thorough examination could be ruthlessly exploited by terrorists and extremists whose mission to undermine our security is being made easier by the very civic institutions which should be protecting us.

The Home Office guidance is so scandalously weak that I cannot believe it was approved by Ministers, particularly not the Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who prides herself on her robustness. Some argue that Ministers might be willing to tolerate such laxity because, superficially, it could seem the most expedient way to clear the vast backlog of asylum claims that now stands at 170,000. By indulging in swift, mass approvals, the Home Office would also, in theory, be able to reduce the colossal bill for accommodating asylum seekers.

But that argument is unconvincing. The softly-softly approach has already been implemented, and yet it has had no impact on the efficiency of the asylum process. In fact, a big expansion in the number of staff processing claims has actually led to lower productivity. Disgracefully, each caseworker now manages to clear just one case per week.

There must be a suspicion that parts of the Home Office workforce welcome the mammoth backlog because it hurts the Tories' credibility.

Nowhere in Whitehall is the Blob – that self-serving nexus of officials, campaigners, trade unionists and academics opposed to Conservative policies – more prominent than at the Home Office, as highlighted by the fight against the implementation of the plan to use Rwanda as a base for deportees, and the open defiance by some staff in placing anti-Government propaganda in their offices.

The people voted for a coherent and fair immigration policy in the 2016 EU referendum and the 2019 General Election when the voters gave the Tories a convincing victory. But the politicians have done far too little to implement that democratic mandate and have ceded too much power to the Blob. They must do better. Starting from now.