There’s trouble in Sir Keir’s Labour paradise, it seems, after the Prime Minister jetted off to Italy for a migration-focused meet-up with Giorgia Meloni. The PM is struggling to find a small boat-busting strategy; with over 800 migrants crossing the Channel to English shores on Saturday alone, Starmer has turned to his European allies for help. Meloni’s Italy has seen a rather large drop in small boat arrivals this year compared to last, with the help of a deterrent in the form of Albania – and the Labour leader is hoping to pick up some tips during his jaunt around Rome. Yet not everyone is particularly thrilled about the meeting…
As Katy Balls wrote this morning, Starmer’s trip has been met with howls of outrage from those on the left. Take Labour left-winger Kim Johnson, for example, who fumed to the Guardian that ‘it is disturbing that Starmer is seeking to learn lessons from a neo-fascist government’. Crikey. She went on:
Meloni’s approach to Albanian migration has been described as a ‘model of mismanagement and a blueprint for abuse’ by Human Rights Watch… Have we learned nothing from the Tories’ failures? Higher security and draconian deportation measures fail to dissuade desperate people from seeking asylum, and risk significant human rights violations.
Talk about pulling no punches, eh? Another unnamed Starmer critic slammed the PM’s ‘cosying up to Meloni’ as ‘shameful’, fuming: ‘This leaves a very bad taste in the mouths of many people in our party.’ And, of course, Diane Abbott has waded into the matter too, taking to Twitter this afternoon to rage: ‘Why is [Starmer] meeting with Italian PM Giorgia Meloni, a literal fascist, to discuss immigration? What does he hope to learn from her?’ Only in her haste to hit out at the PM she, er, tagged an unwitting software engineer from Baltimore instead. Not like Labour to be sloppy with the specifics, eh?
And speaking of detail – or a lack thereof – David Lammy has once again managed to put his foot in the PM’s plans. Veering off script, the Foreign Secretary initially claimed the UK would consider replicating Italy’s method of processing migrants in a third country like Albania – despite his government quite promptly binning off the Rwanda scheme when it came into power – before a Home Office source was forced to deny this was government policy. ‘It is not something we are working on,’ the insider insisted. Awkward…
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