Britain’s likely incoming Labour government has “no plans” to stop illegal Channel crossings and will only make the problem worse, a migration expert has claimed.
The party says it will scrap Rishi Sunak’s ‘Rwanda plan,’ designed to deter illegal migration with the threat of deportation to the African nation, despite (dubious) Conservative Party claims that the scheme is finally starting to work.
In its place, Labour said it would simply speed up the rate at which asylum claims are decided. This would allow all those who have entered the UK illegally since March last year to have their claims heard. But Labour officials told The Times that there would not be an “amnesty”—instead, they would seek return agreements with other countries for those whose claims are rejected.
Alp Mehmet, who is chairman of the Migration Watch UK think tank, was left unconvinced by the details of this ‘plan.’ He told The European Conservative:
Labour has no plans to stop the boats, beyond proposals to do what is already being done, effectively declaring an amnesty for those here and abandoning the Rwanda scheme.
This will put rocket fuel behind illegal immigration.
Labour didn’t help itself in the face of claims it has no plans to stop Channel crossings when frontbencher Ellie Reeves effectively revealed on Wednesday that her party has not thought about what it will do with the migrants already detained in preparation for their deportation to Rwanda if it gets into office. Talking to the BBC, she stumbled over the cop-out answer that “we are going to have to look at what the situation is with those people if we form a government.”
This lack of foresight is hardly a good look, not least given that respected election analysts say there is a 99% chance of Labour forming the next government.
Labour officials have, however, been much more prepared in their response to criticism of their migration ‘plans’ from Rishi Sunak’s government. After Conservative Chairman Richard Holden accused the opposition of wanting to “introduce a policy that is effectively an advertisement for migrants to come to the UK,” a Labour spokesman jibed that current failures meant “it would take the Tories over a hundred years to send [those in the backlog] all to Rwanda.”
Illegal migration is, of course, just one side of the coin. Mehmet told this publication that he has no more hope when it comes to Labour’s likely approach to legal movement, claiming that “under them, legal immigration will continue at its current dizzying levels.”
