By Josh White
Labour’s sinking poll position is due to its political failures. Especially on immigration.
Keir Starmer’s embrace of Giorgia Meloni shouldn’t come as a shock. The premier is just picking up where Sunak left off.
Meeting the Italian premier last week is part of an anti-migrant package deal, including an agreement with Albania.
The problem is that Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama disagrees.
On Thursday, Rama told the European Parliament that no such arrangements had been made.
“This is an exclusive agreement with Italy because we love everyone, but with Italy, we have unconditional love,” Rama said.
Perhaps a deal wasn’t done yet, and Starmer spoke out of turn.
“The UK and Albania have agreed to cooperate, especially to return Albanian migrants who enter via the English Channel,” said Aycan Prifti, a journalist based in Tirana.
“As part of the plan, Albanian authorities will assist by providing law enforcement cooperation to facilitate faster deportations,” she said.
The deal may be expanded to copy Italy’s outsourcing of migrants to Tirana.
This would mean sending Africans, Arabs, and South Asians to the Balkan country to be held for processing. But it’s hard to know how this policy would develop in practice.
Most media reported that the Albania plan was not under discussion with Meloni.
This was just before her press conference with Starmer, and the early reporting was based on anonymous briefings described.
Never believe anything until it’s officially denied.
The truth was soon in the open, with Starmer praising Meloni’s deal with Rama to intern an estimated 36,000 asylum seekers.
This should be embarrassing for Starmer supporters. Most of his fan club went quiet over the chummy press conference, only to come out punching over the freebies furore.
The actual front for Team Starmer is the 24-hour news cycle. Right now, the hot topic is the premier’s impressive record of accepting expensive gifts from wealthy backers.
Immigration has slid down the news agenda. But it will return soon.
Britain has a perennial immigration crisis. It used to be recurrent, but now it never ends. Yet the Labour government could easily solve the crisis.
The reason it continues is down to political will.
Impossible Solutions
The UK could open serious talks with France about accepting migrants and arrange to open a new centre in Calais to process asylum claims.
But this isn’t the right solution for Labour. And it wouldn’t be the solution that the right favours either.
The problem for right-wingers isn’t that there are dinghies in the channel; it’s the very presence of foreigners on British soil they object to.
But there’s also the fact that the right needs this crisis.
There’s nothing like Muslim invaders to fire up the masses. Small boats arriving at the white cliffs of Dover are a powerful spectacle for the nationalist right.
Tommy Robinson would have you believe the boats are filled with paedophiles, rapists and terrorists. This is the fantasy.
It’s forgotten that this incitement was started by Tory policymaking in the first place.
The last government prevented a safe and legal route for asylum seekers while cracking down on migrants coming in via trucks and freights.
The Conservative government may have deliberately mismanaged immigration, thinking that the results would mean a groundswell of racist voters for them to ride into another election.
But this still might be too generous. Instead, Reform UK absorbed much of the country’s discontent.
The neo-fascist party is still rising despite the summer riots, while Labour is falling fast after the cuts to the winter fuel allowance were revealed.
It’s only going to get worse.
Life After Rwanda
One of the first things Labour did once it came to power was throw out the Rwanda plan.
This deportation scheme was an infamously expensive boondoggle (never mind cruel) and designed to fail from the start.
Former Tory apparatchik Dominic Cummings has said the scheme was never intended to succeed.
According to Cummings, it was designed simply as a distraction—or “dead cat strategy”—during Boris Johnson’s government’s crisis years.
So why didn’t Rishi Sunak dump it?
Sunak began courting the Albanian government earlier this year to discuss reducing migrant numbers. He could have dumped one deal for another, but it was too late for Tory voters.
The financial shock of Liz Truss meant many Tories were less inclined to support perpetual misrule.
Many Conservatives were angry because they’d finally been exposed to the kind of austerity the rest of the country had faced for twelve years.
Nothing would ultimately convince them. Promises to abolish the Human Rights Act and exit the European Court of Human Rights weren’t going to do it.
It was already over, and Sunak knew it.
Needless to say, President Paul Kagame—who rules Rwanda with an iron fist—was more than happy to take the money, and there is little chance of it being repaid.
Perhaps the Rwanda plan should be remembered as Britain’s most generous aid offer to the war-scarred nation.
Starmer would love to use another country as a dumping ground for refugees. Rwanda proved too challenging, but Italy’s Albania scheme offers an alternative model.
Many voters would cheer this policy if it came into force tomorrow, though they would still demand more the day after.
The flow of migrants will not decline in a world where instability is the new normal.
The Danish Option
Plenty of precedents exist for harsh immigration policies executed by centre-left governments.
The myth of open borders and uncontrolled immigration is quite different to the history of European social democracy.
Team Starmer may well be looking to the Danish Social Democrats’ example, who have forged a progressive liberal government combined with tough border controls.
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has presided over some of Europe’s harshest policies against immigrants.
Denmark has even declared parts of Syria ‘safe’ in a bid to kick refugees back to the war-torn nation.
The Frederiksen government has also put offshoring asylum seekers to detention camps in other countries on the agenda. This included a very familiar plan to deport migrants to Rwanda – until the idea was abandoned in 2023.
Labour has a long record of opportunism on immigration. Gordon Brown imposed the Australian-style points-based system on non-EU nationals during the same period when Brown stole the BNP slogan: “British jobs for British workers.”
There’s also the Blue Labour initiative under Ed Miliband.
It was taking off with the Labour leadership until its guru, Maurice Glasman, suggested the party reach out to the English Defence League and embrace nationalism.
The Labour right has long supported stricter immigration rules, whether it was the detention centres created by the Blair government or the restrictions Harold Wilson imposed on Commonwealth immigration.
It’s a great myth that the Labour Party has supported “uncontrolled, mass immigration”.
Even left-wing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn tried to make overtures to those calling for more robust border controls. Such concessions are the norm.
The Labour leadership tried to find a middle ground but found it was always too much for liberals and never going to be enough for nationalists.
Triangulation is still the name of the game thirty years after Blair captured the party machinery.
Now, Keir Starmer may be about to take this strategy much further. However, it will only further disillusion Labour voters.
Particularly BAME Labourites, while emboldening far-right extremists.
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Photograph courtesy of Number 10. Published under a Creative Commons license.