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Patrick O’Flynn
Starmer’s migrant plan is even worse than the Tories’
Labour’s long-awaited approach to stopping the Channel boats is so pusillanimous that it ought to be a political gamechanger for the Conservatives. But it probably won’t be.
As Sir Keir Starmer outlines in various newspapers today, an administration led by him will abandon the Rwanda removals plan and get rid of the Illegal Migration Act which puts in place a bar against people who have arrived illegally claiming asylum. Instead, he will enter talks with the EU about the UK taking a percentage of the ever-increasing flow of irregular migrants over its southern and eastern borders.
As a quid pro quo, he hopes that EU nations, especially France – whose president he is scheduled to meet very soon – will agree to take back those seeking highly visible illegal entry to the UK via Channel dinghies.
Starmer can almost certainly get away with this exercise in flannel on the Channel
The money saved by scrapping Rwanda will then be used to fund a bigger police ‘crackdown’ here and in continental Europe designed to smash the business model of the trafficking gangs (copyright all politicians everywhere).
The people traffickers, says Sir Keir, will be treated like terrorists and subject to asset freezes, lockdowns and blocks on their communications. Sir Keir tells the Times:
‘We effectively exited the returns agreement we were in and have never replaced it.’
Yet that agreement – the so-called ‘Dublin Rules’ – simply didn’t work. It saw only tiny numbers deported from the UK to mainland EU member nations in the pre-Brexit days. France in particular was ultra laggardly about accepting returns. During the whole of 2019, for instance, only 21 people were returned from the UK to France. And for the period between January 2019 and October 2020, only 237 migrants who crossed the English Channel were sent back to any other EU nation. In fact, the rules saw the UK taking back far more people than it was able to deport, receiving 2,390 people and removing only 786 in total between 2017 and 2019.
As Starmer must know, the government has tried hard to agree a better returns arrangement with Brussels but has met a wall of resistance. By far the most likely consequence of Starmer signing us up to take a share of the EU asylum load is that we end up with more irregular migrants, rather than fewer, while boats full of those turned down under that scheme keep setting off across the Channel anyway.
As Nick Timothy, former adviser at the Home Office and now a Conservative candidate, put it:
‘Starmer’s solution to the Channel crossings? To agree quotas of migrants already in safe EU countries. We didn’t accept asylum quotas even when we were in the EU. This is a surrender – and a recipe for yet more immigration.’
Instituting an obligation to accept a proportion of irregular migrants from the EU would actually give Brussels a new power over the UK that it has never previously enjoyed. Absurdly, this would amount to an act of European integration going beyond the mere reversal of Brexit.
As the Red Wall Tory MP Brendan Clarke-Smith put it:
‘This means no Rwanda scheme and the threat of taking even more asylum seekers.’
Given that this issue is now the top political priority of people who voted Conservative in 2019, the Starmer blueprint ought to be a clarion call for the disenchanted to return to the Tory-voting column in opinion polls.
It almost certainly won’t be because of the Conservatives’ own cowardice and uselessness on combating Channel crossings. The electorate would have to possess a vivid political imagination indeed to conceive of how Labour could do any worse.
For five years in a row, ministers have been promising to ‘stop the boats’ and for five years they have failed. So far this year more than 23,000 people have crossed the Channel onto the shores of southern England. Only generally worse weather than in 2022 and an actual deal to return Albanians to their home country have made a contribution to reducing the flow somewhat from the even greater numbers seen last year.
There is no Tory plan in place to extricate Britain from the European human rights regime which enables this racket – indeed many Conservative MPs are openly against doing that – and no workable plan to create offshore capacity to house migrants at a scale which will serve as an effective deterrent.
So Starmer can almost certainly get away with this exercise in flannel on the Channel. Indeed, the early signs are promising for him. Harry Cole, political editor of the Sun – a key publication for swing voters – has already branded it ‘a good start’.
And worse than this is the following consideration: even if the Labour approach disastrously fails when put into practice – and it will – who will believe Tory claims that they could do a better job?
Patrick O’Flynn is a former MEP and political editor of the Daily Express