Emmanuel Macron, the French president, hits town today. It’s Macron’s first state visit to the UK and the first by any EU head of state since Brexit. Today, it’s the King’s turn to take the lead in all the pomp and flummery. Tomorrow, Keir Starmer will take the leading role.
Everyone is watching and waiting, with breath duly bated, as to whether Starmer and the French can secure a landmark deal
Everyone is watching and waiting, with breath duly bated, as to whether Starmer and the French can secure a landmark deal to return migrants crossing the English Channel. The so-called ‘one out, one in’ plan under discussion would see those who arrive illegally in small boats returned to France, while the UK accepted instead migrants with a family link to those already in the UK. Although this will not reduce the overall net migration figures, if it works it will strengthen the idea that the government has some control of its borders. In time it could act as a deterrent to people paying people smugglers £5,000 a time to jump on a barely seaworthy dinghy.
Like all cynical observers, the talk that this is all going down to the wire seems to me designed to heighten the drama of the deal when it inevitably emerges. But the fact that it has taken a year for Starmer and Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, to get to this position is also revealing. Bluntly, Labour expected the old entente with France to be more cordiale than it has been over the last 12 months.
Indeed, it seems to me that one of the signal miscalculations Starmer’s team made in opposition was to assume that just not being the wicked incompetent Tories would be enough to secure a range of favours from our European partners, who seem to have more immutable national interests than us.
On both migration and a new trading relationship, the mood music towards the first Labour PM in 14 years was good. Brussels was tired of the rows and the war in Ukraine showed that the UK still has a significant role to play in European defence. But that did not stop the French digging in over fishing rights with Nick Thomas-Symonds and Michael Ellam, Britain’s EU negotiators, just as they had with David Frost, Oliver Robbins and David Davis. ‘Keir being Keir did not stop the French being French,’ observed one Downing Street aide.
Migration was the one thing where Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister’s chief of staff, seemed to have misunderstood the state of play in 2024. Even he thought the Tories were not really trying to solve the small boats issue in order to keep immigration a salient issue for the general election. Labour would do deals with EU countries, focus on ‘upstream working’ and (of course) ‘smash the gangs’.
No matter how often those of us who talked regularly to the Sunak No. 10 or the Home Office, and stressed that the Conservatives really were trying to get the numbers under control, Labour thought it was all a trick. Cooper is finding it no easier to strike returns deals than Robert Jenrick when he was immigration minister, or upstream working than Ben Wallace tried as defence secretary.
The last year, in this regard above all others, has proved a rude awakening. The fact that Team Starmer now wants a deterrent deal with France shows that they accept that the premise of the Rwanda arrangement was not quite as skew-whiff as they said a year ago.
And the fact that France has been a blockage, so far at least, to migrant returns and EU trade arrangements (which remain very much up in the air) shows that sentimentality will never get in the way of France’s national interest. Remember that when the gushing starts tomorrow.
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