Fresh from heralding the arrest of a Turkish suspected rubber dinghy salesman last month, Keir Starmer’s government is today touting a new advance in its quest to ‘smash the gangs’. At the apparent behest of the Prime Minister, the German government has committed to changing its law to make facilitating people-smuggling a clear criminal offence. This should allow German police to raid warehouses full of dinghies and other equipment later used to help migrants set off to cross the English Channel. According to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper the agreement is ‘ground-breaking’.
From the hoo-ha around this modest measure we may discern that Labour is for now sticking to its single-track approach to reducing the flow of small boats bringing illegal immigrants to our shores: only measures against those making money from moving people are being advanced while nothing meaningful is being done to deter the migrants themselves.
Yet just today, border security minister Angela Eagle has come close to admitting the approach won’t work, characterising the initiatives against the people smugglers as ‘whack-a-mole’, ie whenever they are suppressed in one place, they will just pop up in another.
‘Just because you have to play whack-a-mole doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to take down organised immigration crime,’ Eagle said.
This is a classic straw man argument. Nobody is saying the government should not be trying to break up the supply side of the people-moving racket. The criticism is that nothing is being done to tackle the demand side where Labour’s sole contribution to date has been to scrap the Tory Rwanda plan that might just have served as a potent deterrent.
If Labour sticks to this approach for much longer it will find itself in as much trouble on the issue of immigration as the Tories are in. And that is a place in which no party should wish to find itself.
By the spring, a new administration in the United States will be busily deporting illegal migrants by the thousand. Undoubtedly, various European countries will also be upping the ante on border control in acknowledgement that western societies are coming apart under the strain of mass immigration from non-aligned cultures. The election in Germany in February, for example, is bound to see establishment parties seek to draw the sting out of attacks from the hardline AfD by offering at least a half-strength version of its agenda.
If Labour just carries on offering amnesties to clear ‘backlogs’, commissioning more hotels for asylum-seeker accommodation and running a mid-Channel water taxi service then it will soon be in deep, deep bother with the British electorate.
One man and one political party stands to benefit from that: Nigel Farage and Reform. For both Britain’s major parties to be hors de combat simultaneously on the top concern of voters – especially the 17 million who voted Leave in 2016 – will leave the turquoise tornado perfectly set up to break out of its supposed 20 per cent ceiling and reach polling levels that transform first past the post from a daunting hurdle into its best friend.
One senses from the ramping up of Starmer’s rhetoric last week about the Tory failure to control legal immigration that some in his inner circle understand the paradigm-busting impact of Trump’s remade Republican party sweeping the board. The Labour leader is now posing as a mass migration sceptic and indeed is on course to at least halve the utterly extraordinary levels to which net migration was permitted to rocket under Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak.
But it’s not enough. Nowhere near. A plurality of the electorate now demands that Britain’s rulers end the era of mass migration altogether. And those who gatecrash the country illegally and still get put up in four-star hotels are considered a particular affront.
Until its demeanour towards those who troop off the boats at Dover changes from ‘refugees welcome’ sympathy into chilly resentment, Labour will keep burning through its already-depleted stocks of political capital. Is it capable of performing a genuine volte-face? Probably not. Is it capable of appearing to do so? Well, that’s a matter for the spin doctors.
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