Today the much-vaunted ‘one in, one out’ agreement over returning small boat migrants to France officially comes into effect. Keir Starmer, as you might expect, has announced with an air of quiet satisfaction that repatriation can now start in earnest and implied that the Channel-sized hole in Britain’s borders is well on the way to being stopped up.
If only. Well before any removal flight disappears into the clouds covering the UK, the government’s plan to make us cast aside our worries about immigration is fast unravelling. Even the embattled Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, desperate to cast herself as a migration tough girl for the benefit of the white van man, has refused point-blank to put a figure on the number of illegals we can actually expect to get rid of as a result.
Immigration matters immensely to voters here: they wish to see the influx stopped, period
This is not surprising. As an inconvenient piece in yesterday’s Times pointed out, the agreement we have is as porous as our own border; it is severely limited, puts most of the burden on us, and gives France enormous discretion over who it actually takes.
Read the agreement, and you can see why. Who can we send back? No one under 18; no one who is a threat to public order anywhere in the Schengen area, or (yes, you read this right) a threat to the UK’s own public order or national security. No one who has been here over three months; and any request must be made within 14 days of arrival. And further, no one with an outstanding human rights claim not certified as manifestly unfounded, and no one with a judicial remedy outstanding.
Effectively this means France can refuse anyone it doesn’t like; one suspects Paris in practice will do its best to admit only those it can in turn palm off on third countries. It also remains possible that almost anyone nominated will be able to stymie the whole caboodle by putting in a just plausible human rights claim and hoping – probably rightly – that our courts will take more than the magic three months finally to dispose of it.
This is not a serious agreement. It is a window-dressing exercise aimed more at press conference cameras than aid to Border Force officers on the beach. Furthermore, this should have been obvious from the start. Starmer and French president Emmanuel Macron are both second-rate products of a self-satisfied progressive establishment, both shallow politicians facing deep electoral distrust, and both needing a chance to distract attention by strutting the international podium. Any agreement, even one that meant very little, could provide them with the necessary chance to show an air of specious international statesmanship.
Starmer, for his part, also knew that, just as with his predecessor Rishi Sunak, the immigration issue could make or break him at home. He was also conscious of three other things: that he was losing the migration propaganda war, that he desperately needed an agreement with France to salvage his position, and that France had no interest whatever in agreeing to anything substantial.
It is a racing certainty that the instructions to the UK officials negotiating with the Quai d’Orsay in the last couple of months will have reflected these facts. Reach agreement on migrant returns, they will have been told: almost any agreement will do. Don’t worry about making concessions even if they mean the treaty isn’t worth the Foreign Office paper it’s written on: provided there is something to wave in front of journalists, that’s what matters. (The suggestion yesterday from a Times leader writer that Starmer is in fact ‘generally a good diplomat’ can only raise a ghastly laugh.)
What will happen? A few fairly harmless would-be migrants will, we suspect, be deported to France, but they will be a drop in the ocean: a few percentage points of the numbers landing on our shores. Oddly enough, this is probably what both Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron envisaged from the start. Starmer will be able to say to voters here that he has accelerated the process of deportation a little: Macron can boast to his sceptical constituents in France about his being able to satisfy the tiresome English with a few fairly nominal concessions.
Despite all this, Starmer remains in deep trouble. Immigration matters immensely to voters here: they wish to see the influx stopped, period. They care not a fig for the genteel obsession with human rights and internationalism still espoused by too many high-ups within Labour. When they see arrivals mounting, they will be angrier than ever.
Furthermore, this government already has a reputation for being a government that is competent at propaganda but little else. Its new trumpeting of supposed achievements on the migration front will only encourage further shrugs and cynicism. More and more of the just-about-managing Middle England that resignedly voted him in last year will either resolve not to vote at all next time, or join the exodus to Reform. One thing is clear: they will never trust Starmer again.
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