It comes as a relief to learn that Keir Starmer doesn’t really believe setting up a new security organisation to ‘smash the gangs’ will stop illegal immigration in small boats.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper goes around parroting the phrase as if saying it and doing it were the very same thing. It also got Labour through the election – mainly thanks to the Tories never having made their Rwanda plan operational. Yet now it has emerged that increasing the quantity of gold braid and epaulettes via the creation of a new ‘Border Security Command’ is not the only game in town for the Prime Minister.
That plan involves doing the very thing that the Tories spent the election accusing him of lining up
It has been reported by the Times that Starmer will hold a meeting on illegal immigration with Italian premier Giorgia Meloni in the margins of a gathering of the European Political Community (EPC) on Thursday. The EPC, which has 47 members, is the talking-shop body suggested by Emmanuel Macron as an umbrella group for nearly all European states following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Starmer will host it at Blenheim Palace this week – his first key foreign policy event on home soil.
The bilateral with Meloni will focus on creating a common approach towards ‘irregular’ migration given that she has spearheaded European Union efforts to stem the influx of undocumented people from Asia and Africa. It gives credence to recent suggestions by the very well plugged-in columnist for the Independent, Andrew Grice, that Starmer has an undeclared plan to bring a halt to the humiliating spectacle of tens of thousands of people in rubber dinghies gatecrashing Britain.
That plan involves doing the very thing that the Tories spent the election accusing him of lining up: accepting an annual quota of asylum seekers from the EU – perhaps 100,000 – in order to get EU agreement to take back migrants who have illegally entered the UK via the Channel.
While France would be the crucial country to win over to clear the way for such a scheme, Meloni is judged by government insiders to be the key to unlocking EU-wide consent.
Such a deal – involving a huge rise in the volume of asylum-seekers – will certainly not assuage those of us who believe this issue is either mainly or partly a numbers game. But it could push the issue down the political pecking order by curtailing the credibility-shredding spectacle of foreign men in dinghies breaking into Britain – often brought to shore by UK Border Force or RNLI vessels. For who would pay a people-moving gang thousands of euros for a place in a dinghy only to be removed back to the continental mainland upon arrival? Meanwhile asylum-seekers accepted from the EU under an official scheme could be brought to Britain in an orderly and low-key way.
There would be roughly a trebling of the cross-Channel asylum burden on British society but also an invisibility cloak would be thrown over it. Bingo, Labour could shout, we have stopped the boats, we have broken the business model of the gangs!
The danger for Labour – and us – is that while the extra 100,000 annual allocation would arrive regular as clockwork, there would still be quite a lot of chancers prepared to pay to get in a dinghy, gambling that Britain’s ultra-liberal legal processes would afford them an avenue to block their removal.
I fancy this is not what the British public envisage when they hear promises from politicians to ‘stop the boats’ and restore rigour to our borders. And yet the Tory failure on this front has been so epic that Starmer may be able to claim it as a triumph.
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