Starmer’s Migration Plan Dodges Real Reform

Record Channel crossing figures and the conviction of just five people smugglers this year prove once and for all that the UK Labour government’s “smash the gangs” pledge is a con. And the fact Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s team is in talks with French officials to establish a returns agreement that focusses not on the gangs but on the migrants themselves shows that even he knows this to be true.

The discussions, reported in Wednesday’s Financial Times, could result in a small number of recent arrivals in the UK being sent back to France to deter future Channel crossings, in return for France sending individuals ‘who have a right to be in Britain’ the other way.

Proposals are reminiscent of the former Conservative government’s failed ‘Rwanda Plan,’ to deter crossings by sending migrants to the East African nation to have their asylum claims processed. Starmer dismissed this scheme as a “gimmick,” but his own plan doesn’t seem likely to produce any more successful results.

The Rwanda Plan’s principle of deterring migrant crossings by making it clear that illegal arrivals could not stay was fairly sound, but was inevitably lost in the legislation designed by establishment figures who never believed it would work—and perhaps never intended for it to do so. It would, if carried out, have likely resulted in more Rwandans being sent to Britain than illegal migrants being sent to Rwanda.

There are concerns that Starmer’s latest scheme with the French is bound to fail, too. Robert Bates, from the Centre for Migration Control think tank, told europeanconservative.com that “a returns agreement with France would only compound the problems we are already facing here in Britain and risk drawing us into a Europe-wide scheme that would swamp our asylum system.”

Indeed, the UK-France agreement is being reported merely as a ‘pilot’ which—as one French official put it—“anticipates a future European agreement.”

Bates added that collaboration with the European Union is “far from” the solution to the Channel crisis, which yesterday saw 705 migrants cross in one day—the highest daily figure this year so far. Instead,

Unilateral mass deportations—returning illegal migrants to their country of origin or a third country—completely destroys the business model of the people smugglers by removing all pull factors that make people want to actually come here.

The British public are sick of seeing their country walked over by illegal migrants, foreign courts and politicians, and a domestic political class who are doing everything they can to avoid the tough but decisive action that is needed.