Labour leader Sir Kier Starmer made a move to park his tanks on the Conservatives’ lawn by announcing he would fix the English Channel migrant crisis if elected, but observers including Brexit leader Nigel Farage warn it would fail solve the problem and would even make things worse.
The people smugglers who bring migrants across the English Channel in small boats should be treated like terrorists, Labour Leader and would-be next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Sir Kier Starmer wrote this week in headline-catching remarks meant to position his party as one that will be tough on border criminals. While eye-catching, the claim came with other measures he said would enable the changes he foresaw.
Shockingly, Starmer said the United Kingdom should set course to drift back towards integration with the European Union, rejoining Europol and joining the bloc’s migrant resettlement programme, the same system Poland is presently fighting so hard to escape.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer leaving Europol in The Hague, Netherlands, following their meeting to discuss how Labour would tackle Channel crossings. Picture date: Thursday September 14, 2023. (Photo by Stefan Rousseau/PA Images via Getty Images)
While the Conservatives have been quick to jump on Starmer’s plan as unworkable or unrealistic, they do so from a position of considerable weakness themselves, having been in power for 13 unboken years during which time migrant levels have only risen. This failure is doubly damaging for the Conservatives at the ballot box because they have fought many elections over the past two decades on a platform of promising to make major cuts to migrant arrival numbers — both legal and illegal — and have not only failed, but also admitted they lied about really wanting to try in the first place.
Trying to provide their own covering fire for this persistent failure, policing minister Chris Philp insisted Friday morning that the Prime Minister would fulfil pledges on migration “in the fullness of time”.
Brexit leader and Channel Migrant Crisis campaigner Nigel Farage added his critique of Starmer’s scheme on his weeknight television programme on Thursday evening, drawing laughter from the audience as he spoke of the naieve “optimism” of the idea that the French government would suddenly stop boats leaving their shores when all other attempts to persuade them to do so had failed.
In “return” for the UK joining EU programmes, even the asylum policy that Britain had opted out of when it was a member of the European Union, Farage said that under Starmer’s plan: “we’ll take ‘our share’ of people crossing the Mediterranean. Given that 8,000 people have landed in Lampedusa alone in the past three days, it seems to me we would actually be taking more people illegally coming from other parts of the world than we currently are, and I don’t believe for one moment it would even stop the boats.
“It’s a policy that won’t work, and it’s a policy which takes us back much closer to being members of the European Union and I think Starmer’s Labour party have made a big mistake today.”
Joining Farage on the show was former UK Home Secretary Priti Patel, who expressed concern, saying the number of migrants Britain could end up taking from Europe in return for the promise of cooperation was open ended. She told the Brexiteer: “they’re just going to walk us straight back into Europe on this. and you’ve heard they want to burden share, so that means we’ll have to take people from the EU… that will be a quota and it could just keep changing”.
English Channel Migrant Crisis to Last At Least Another Five Years, Admits Leaked Govt Document https://t.co/4ru0wj6bqr
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) August 14, 2023
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