Planes have changed: Britain’s controversial asylum policy

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. In New York, I'm John Fassman.

And in London, I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Afghanistan's economy is in a wretched state. Joblessness is rampant, food prices are rising and sanctions have left banks cut off from the world. But the Taliban has proven surprisingly adept tax collectors. How it spends the money is another story.

And electric vehicles are around in ever greater numbers, as they should be if transportation is ever to go fully fossil free. But for a whole battery of reasons, there are more roadblocks ahead on the way to that future.

First stop, though.

If Britain's government had its way right now, scores of asylum seekers who'd arrived on British shores would be in Rwanda. Back in April, the government unveiled a plan to give them a one way ticket to the country and pay the government there to deal with their claims. That plan was met with plenty of resistance and outcry on both moral and legal grounds as court challenge after court challenge was lodged. Prime Minister Boris Johnson remained resolute yesterday ahead of the first planned deportations.

We always said that this was going to be a long process. If you remember when I first announced the policy, I said it would take a long time to get going. There would be plenty of legal challenges There will be bumps on the road, but I think what opponents of the policy have to to say is, well, what is your alternative? What is your alternative?

But a plane bound for Rwanda's capital, Kigali, never took off.

Yesterday, the British government tried to fly a plane load of asylum seekers to Rwanda, where their claims would be heard by the Rwandan government, and it failed.

Joel Budd is the Economist's social policy editor.

They started off with a decent number of people on the plane, but the number was whittled down as a result of various legal challenges and the Home Office backing down. And then in the end, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that, in essence, nobody could be deported.

And how did things get to that 11th hour moment?

Britain has a new policy for dealing with asylum seekers. So every year, about 25,000 people cross the English Channel in small boats and immediately claim asylum in the uk. And the government has passed a law which allows it to determine those people to be illegal or to have arrived illegally in the uk. And the government has given itself the right to send them to Rwanda, where their claims will be heard instead by the Rwandan government. The law is controversial. It's opposed by the Labour Party and by many Conservatives. It's opposed by the Church of England, and according to reporting, it is opposed by Prince Charles. But it's supported by a fair number, roughly three quarters of Conservative voters in opinion polls. The government is trying to move extremely quickly. It's trying to get people on planes to Rwanda before the legality of the policy can be tested in the British courts. And that's why we had the frantic scenes that we had yesterday.

So what was the nature of the legal challenges that ultimately pulled all those people off the plane?

The asylum seekers or the lawyers who are acting on their behalf appealed first of all to the British courts and were successful in some of those challenges. But there still remained a few people. I think at 9 or 10pm last night, there were still six people sitting on the tarmac in Wiltshire in a military airport. And what then happened was one of them appealed to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. And that court ruled not that the policy is illegal, but that the legality of the policy needs to be established. So, in other words, the British government needs to wait until the British courts have ruled that this policy is legal. And their reasoning is that once somebody has been sent to Rwanda, there's no way of sort of undoing the action, as it were, because, you know, the British government can't necessarily sort of fish somebody out of Rwanda. And so although the British government has said, oh, well, we're going to try and fly more people to Rwanda as quickly as we possibly can, I think in practice it's probably going to be the case that we're going to have to wait until that formal review which happens next month.

And so how has the government responded to this situation where it's essentially been overruled in the courts?

The government has repeated what it has said all along, which is that the current asylum system is unfair and dangerous and that having a system which depends on people employing people smugglers and then coming across the English Channel very, very dangerously in little inflatable boats and then claiming asylum is really not an ideal system at all, and that some kind of alternative needs to be created. And really what it's trying to do is to deter people from trying to claim asylum in Britain at all. So instead, in theory, Britain will sort of go out to refugee camps in Turkey or somewhere else and identify people as genuine refugees in those camps and fly them to the UK rather than having the system where, as it were, the process is led by the claimants themselves.

And so to your mind, would that work? Is the view then from outside Britain that you're just going to get shipped out to Rwanda anyway and therefore, you know, it wouldn't bother going. Do you think that would work as a deterrence?

Well, we know that making countries more hostile to asylum seekers, making policy more hostile does not work in the sense of deterring people from trying to come. So, for example, if a country decides to ban asylum seekers from working while they're waiting for their claims to be heard, or decides that they must be incarcerated while they wait for their claims, it's pretty clear that that has no effect on the number of asylum seekers trying to reach a country. And we know that for two reasons. One is we can compare countries policies and the other reason is that we can ask asylum seekers. And when you ask asylum seekers about why they are trying to come to Britain or to any other country, they don't come out with a whole long list of kind of bureaucratic procedural points. They don't say, oh, well, I decided to come to Britain because I'm aware that there's a particular legal loophole. Instead, they say things like, well, I've heard of Manchester United, I've heard of the Queen, and my second cousin is living in London and he says, the police don't beat you up all the time. So they are strikingly ill informed about British policy. So the idea, I think, that asylum Seekers will have heard about these ructions yesterday and that there's some small danger that they might be deported to Rwanda. I think it's unlikely they'll hear about it. And I think even if they do hear about it, it probably won't deter them very much because the numbers, at least so far, are not big enough. If the British government prevails and manages to send really large number of asylum seekers straight to Rwanda without hearing their claims, I mean, like in the thousands or tens of thousands per year, then that's a whole different story. That would almost certainly drastically reduce the number of people trying to seek asylum in the UK and do you think.

That'S how it will go, given the challenges from yesterday? Will the government get past this as a legal hiccup or is this fatally flawed, legally speaking?

That's very hard to read. It's always hard to predict how the courts will rule on any issue. There will be a lot more screaming and shouting and there'll probably be more attempts to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda over the next few weeks. And there'll be lots of threats that Britain should leave the European Convention on Human Rights. But I think the most important thing to watch for is that next month the British courts will rule on the legality of the entire policy. So really, we're waiting for that now.

Thanks very much for joining us, Joel.

Thank you.

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Less than a year ago, all eyes were on Afghanistan as the American backed government fell and the Taliban retook power. The world watched as Afghans clung on to departing aircraft in their desperation to flee the capital, Kabul. But since then, a war in Ukraine and the prospect of a global recession have drawn attention away from the country and outside the spotlight. Poverty and hunger, not war, have stricken it.

A crisis of hunger putting 9 million on the cusp of famine and half of all of Afghanistan's children at risk of dying.

Afghanistan's GDP has shriveled, trade has slowed and businesses sit empty and idle. But the Taliban's ability to protect its revenues has taken many by surprise.

So When US Forces left Kabul in August, the entire economy just totally broke down.

Avantika Chilkoti is an international correspondent for the Economist.

Overnight, America froze and then seized the country's overseas central bank reserves. Foreign funding that really propped up the state budget totally disappeared. And sanctions meant that local banks could no longer transact with international banks, which left the country desperately short of cash. That meant middle class Afghans couldn't pull their savings out of banks, employers, NGOs couldn't pay their staff, and the entire economy just came to a standstill.

And in the months since, has the situation improved? Has the country's economy stabilized?

So the economy has definitely not stabilized. At the moment, most of the population is living below the poverty line. The country suffered one of its worst droughts in decades, which means that millions of people are starving. There's one sort of part of the economy which has done better than many expected, and that's public finances. Since taking control, the Taliban have done everything they can to make sure domestic revenues keep coming in. That's one thing the Taliban had very good experience of, even when they were an insurgency in the provinces that they controlled. The they collected religious tithes, they collected a share of farmers harvests. They also collected, for example, unofficial taxes. One estimate is that they collected between 27.5 million and 35 million a year just from the illicit drug trade. Given that, the World bank estimates that this year the Taliban will make $1.7 billion through taxes, fees, customs, things like that. And that's actually almost three quarters of what the previous administration made at home in 2020. Pretty impressive given that since 2020 you've had a global slowdown, you've had trade come to a halt, and many Afghan taxpayers have just fled the country.

So given all that, how have the Taliban managed to collect as much as they have this year?

So one part of it is just that they're sort of a brutal fundamentalist group. People are terrified of them, and as a result, they know how to collect money. There's also two. One is a very practical point. There's a handful of holdovers from the previous administration who stayed on in the finance Ministry. And they are keeping up maybe six or seven software systems that the American backed government put into place to basically keep a track of revenues, digitize everything, and they're still using that. So it's a pretty efficient system even compared to some rich world governments. Secondly, there's really been a massive crackdown on grafts. One thing the previous administration was really bashed for was just how bad Corruption was. There's been some recent World bank surveys, and they just show that businesses trying to clear customs, businesses trying to file their taxes, they're no longer being asked for a kickback. And just getting all that money into the formal government purse as such, can be a huge boost.

What are they spending that money on?

What's really sort of devastating is that they're spending a lot of that money on defence. The Taliban produced an interim budget, and in that, about 40% of total spending was going to defence and security. Now, we reckon that in this financial year, that'll rise to 50%. At a time when civil servants are having massive pay cuts, teachers and doctors are going unpaid, much of the population is starving. It doesn't really make sense why that much money is going into defence and security. When they were in insurgency, the Taliban had tens of thousands of fighters in the provinces. There's no transparency, but presumably a lot of this money is going into paying them. There are small conflicts in the east of the country and the north that they need to fight. But it really doesn't make sense to be spending 50% of the government budget on defense. As I say, this is a time when food prices are rising 18% year on year. Private businesses have laid off almost two thirds of their employees. So families that were middle class a year ago don't have any income now. It's really a misallocation of funds.

So I can't help thinking you're right, Avantikan, that it is a misallocation of funds, especially considering the humanitarian issues that you mentioned. What's the Taliban doing, if anything, to address those?

This is sort of the baffling part. It seems like the Taliban is playing a game of chicken with the international community. No one wants to offer direct support to them, but there still remains this question of 40 million people in this country who need help. They've stopped producing very detailed budgets, which leaves donors pretty worried about where money is going. And when they did make a budget announcement last month, they said they'd run a $500 million deficit this year. So they're making a lot of money at home. That's pretty striking and frankly impressive. But they still can't plug the gap that they face because foreign grants and borrowing and reserves are no longer available. And without donor support, without any reserves to tap, they're really going to struggle to make ends meet. In recent months, they've shut women out of public life. They roll back on their promise to let girls back into secondary school, even as they announce their first full budgets, the authorities dissolve the Human Rights Commission. So they're saying they're going to be short of cash, but they're making it very difficult for anyone to step in and provide the support they need.

So this game of chicken with the international donor community, it seems to hinge on a fundamental question. Does the international community want the Taliban to succeed or to fail?

That's the big question that since August, everyone's been avoiding answering. And the sense I get is everyone wants to help the Afghan people. The UN announced its largest ever single country appeal earlier this year, planning to raise $4.4 billion in emergency aid for Afghanistan. But no one wants to prop up this regime. And as they get more and fundamentalist, as they roll back on transparency in the Finance Ministry, they refuse to share their budget documents. I think it's increasingly getting difficult for anyone to say they want this regime to succeed. But how do you help the Afghan people without helping the government?

Avantika, thanks very much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

This year's super bowl featured no fewer than seven different ads for electric vehicles.

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High fuel prices have made EVs a hot commodity, with dealers selling them well above sticker price. But their current popularity belies a longer term problem. There just aren't enough of them on the road to get the world's carbon emissions down to where they should be.

The electric car revolution needs to speed up. Just one in 70 of the world's 1.2 billion cars is electric.

James Francham is the Economist's data correspondent.

But if the world is to stay on track for net zero emissions by 2050, one in six cars by 2030 needs to be electric.

And that's because of emissions from fossil fuel burning cars. How big a part of global carbon emissions does transport account for?

The transport of people and goods. So from cars, planes and shipping causes about one fifth of total carbon emissions. So that's about 8 gigatons of CO2 last year. And the COVID 19 restrictions dampened the demand for travel. So emissions from the sector fell by 10% in 2020. But people again on the move. Travel is really coming back and obviously that carries an environmental cost. At the same time, many countries have really ambitious roadmaps to replace gas guzzling internal combustion engines with battery powered cars. So for example, Britain plans to ban the sale of petrol cars by 2030. And targets like this will Help the world to dodge the worst of global warming. But of course they need to meet those targets.

Even if they're short of those targets, people are still buying more electric vehicles now compared to a couple years ago, right?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, thanks to the improvement in battery technology, expanding charging network and government subsidies, sales of electric cars last year they doubled from 3 million to 6.5 million, according to a recent tally from the International Energy Agency, a Paris based think tank. And so that's about one in every 12 new cars sold. But I would actually say that not every electric vehicle is the. So if you break down that tally, about one third of those cars were plug in hybrids, which also used petrol. But when they are used correctly, that is they're charged for electric use too. They're about twice as efficient as conventional cars. So about 70% of the 6.5 million were kind of pure plug in battery powered vehicles, which are about four times as efficient as petrol engines.

And if you look around the world, who's leading the way on this and who's lagging behind?

Some countries are transitioning to EVs far faster than others. And it probably won't surprise you, John, that Norway, a rich energy independent country, is racing ahead. Quite remarkably, about one quarter of all cars on the roads in Norway are electric vehicles. And more broadly in Europe as a whole, annual demand there is really growing. The annual average growth has been 65% over the past five years, which makes it the fastest growing EV market in the world. In China, electric car sales accounted for 16% of the total last year. And so that's about half of all EV sales last year were in China. In America, which is the world's second largest car market behind China, it's lagging way behind. So less than 5% of the cars sold last year were electric. And its market is dominated by one premium maker, Tesla. And unfortunately, the kind of big legacy Detroit manufacturers have yet to make up much ground there.

But even assuming that changes, and with the quick transitioning rate of Europe, the broad message is that this move still isn't happening quickly enough, right?

Yeah, totally not fast enough at all. So there are now 16 million electric vehicles, electric cars, on the roads around the world. But that makes up a minuscule share of the 1.2 billion cars. So the IEA reckons at current rates, somewhere between 22% and 35% of sales in 2030 will be for electric cars. But to meet the global goal of net carbon emissions by 2050, electric cars will need to increase their new car share by up to 60% by 2030. So there's a big gap there.

Why is that? And what else could we do to get there?

The first thing I would mention is that global supply chains, they've been problematic, obviously, this year for various different reasons, and they're likely to limit how fast the transition to electric vehicles can happen. But beyond that, there's a whole infrastructure problem that needs to be solved. So the electricity supply obviously needs to be rapidly decarbonized to make electric vehicles worthwhile. There's no point burning fossil fuels and then charging your electric vehicle with basically electricity generated from coal or gas. And then we also need to manage the extra load on the grid and to provide a thorough and decent charging network that will enable electric vehicles to be as useful and productive as cars burning fossil fuels. So, yeah, in short, John, the path to full EV adoption has many roadblocks ahead.

All right, James, thanks so much for joining us today.

My pleasure.

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