The Solicitude of Locked Doors

The Home Office has always had beautiful manners. Its refusals arrive on good paper, its regrets are sincerely held, and its policies are named with the tender consideration one usually reserves for a convalescent aunt. Nobody at the ministry would dream of saying no to a mother in Gaza. They say instead that they are concerned for her safety, which is far more refined, and which has the additional merit of producing exactly the same result.

Beneath the table, however, a court has been gnawing at the furniture.

It has quashed the decision that kept mothers and children in Gaza from joining their families in the United Kingdom, and in doing so it has disturbed one of the more elegant arrangements in the modern repertoire. The arrangement worked like this. Since October, when the Visa Application Centre in Gaza closed its doors, there has been no place inside the territory where an applicant can present herself, be fingerprinted, and be formally noticed by the British state. To be noticed, one must leave. To leave, one must travel through a war. And the Unsafe Journeys Policy exists precisely so that the Home Office need not encourage anyone to travel through a war. The circle closes with the soft click of a well-oiled latch.

It is worth admiring the craftsmanship before taking it apart. The state closes the door, then declines to ask anyone to walk to the next door, because the corridor is dangerous, and then records, with real sorrow, that no one has arrived. At no point has anyone been refused. Everyone has merely been protected, at a distance, indefinitely.

The strongest defence of this deserves a fair hearing, and the ministry’s advocates would give it handsomely. A government that waves families through checkpoints and across shelled roads, promising a welcome it cannot guarantee they will survive to collect, would be reckless. If a child were killed en route to a biometrics appointment, the same newspapers now applauding the court would be demanding resignations. Caution, on this view, is not cruelty. It is the grown-up refusal to make promises one cannot keep.

It is a good argument, and it has one defect, which is that it pretends there is a safe option on the table. There is not. The policy does not choose between danger and safety. It chooses between the danger of the journey and the danger of staying, and it chooses the second on the family’s behalf while describing the choice as having been made for them out of kindness. Remaining in Gaza is not the absence of an unsafe journey. It is an unsafe residence, and the policy has no name for that, because naming it would spoil the symmetry.

Here is where the child comes in, as children in drawing rooms always do, at the wrong moment and unbriefed.

Imagine a girl of perhaps eight, sitting on a mattress in a borrowed room, being told that a kind office in London has decided it would be too dangerous for her to come to her father. She would not understand the Unsafe Journeys Policy. She would understand, with complete clarity, that the people worried about the road are not the people sleeping beside it. That is the observation the whole arrangement was designed to keep off the agenda, and it is the observation the court, in its drier dialect, appears to have made: a rule written to prevent harm cannot lawfully be applied so mechanically that its only operative effect is to guarantee a different harm.

What makes this genuinely interesting, rather than merely sad, is the incentive it reveals. A refusal on grounds of policy looks like an ordinary political choice, and ordinary political choices can be argued with in Parliament. A refusal dressed as protection is almost unarguable, because to oppose it one must appear to favour danger. The ministry did not need to defend keeping these two families out. It needed only to defend caring about them, which nobody can be against. The court’s quiet achievement was to notice that the concern and the closed door were the same object, wearing different hats.

The Home Office will now reconsider, which is the institutional word for retiring to another room. It may well return with the same answer in a better font. Drawing rooms are resilient; the staff are excellent, and stains come out of almost anything given time.

But somewhere a father in Britain has a spare bed made up, the sheets folded the way a child likes them, and for the first time since October the bed is not merely a gesture.