I don’t understand why you’re so resistant to accepting that Dublin did us no favours at all and we’d have been better off ditching it a few years before Brexit. Is it an anti Brexit thing? You’re so cross about it that you want to attribute all of our current issues to it? I understand that, but you’re flogging a dead horse over Dublin.
Yes, if it makes you happy, we technically had the means to argue that case, but looking at the stats, we had very few cases that met the criteria we needed to satisfy before we could argue it. I repeat, we accepted more people under Dublin than we removed. It was not a loss to the UK.
And of course, one of the criteria was demonstrating that asylum applicants had been in a particular country. Do you think EU countries would simply take our word for it that an asylum applicant had said he’d been through countries A, B and C en route to the UK? Even if he admitted to knowing his route? And bearing in mind that France is not the only country in Europe that is not landlocked, do you think they’d be willing to accept the return of thousands of asylum seekers from the UK because it’s ’obvious’ that’s where they came from? No, they absolutely wouldn’t.