Sir Keir Starmer’s confusion of the causes of the crossings will lead him to repeat the errors of the Conservatives
Daily Telegraph
Sir Keir Starmer has evidently taken a shine to Lancaster House, the imposing mansion in London’s St James’s district. It has hosted two Government summits in short order, its lavish interiors offering a distraction from the paucity of the achievements. It is so ornate that Queen Victoria remarked to the owner on visiting: “I have come from my House to your Palace.”
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A few weeks ago it provided the backdrop for the Prime Minister’s efforts to cobble together a “coalition of the willing” to send peacekeeping forces in Ukraine, an initiative that has foundered on the rocks of Russian intransigence.
On Monday, Sir Keir was back to launch a 40-nation summit aimed at curbing illegal immigration. A more incongruous setting for talks about how to deal with the flow of people from Africa and Asia desperately seeking a new life in Europe is hard to imagine. The austere surroundings of Dover Castle, the “key to England”, would have been better.
However, these meetings are not convened to do anything but to give the impression of doing something. They seem to be a vehicle solely to extol the soi-disant diplomatic skills of the PM himself and to show that he really understands what people feel about illegal immigration.
“It makes them angry,” he told delegates. “It makes me angry, frankly, because it is unfair on ordinary working people who pay the price, from the cost of hotels to our public services struggling under the strain.”
So far, so good. But the analysis that followed was fundamentally flawed and is at the root of all the problems. “It’s unfair on the illegal migrants themselves because these are vulnerable people being ruthlessly exploited by vile gangs,” Sir Keir said.
The answer, therefore, is to “smash the gangs” and the problem will go away. Everyone knows this is rubbish, including, one assumes, Sir Keir himself, though you do wonder. The gangs may be vile and ruthless but they exist to meet a demand. Only when that is suppressed will the traffic abate.
Moreover, the idea that the gangs only come into being when the migrants get to the Channel is absurd. Everyone trying to get across will already have travelled thousands of miles to the French coast, paying people smugglers along the way for transport and visas.
This is hardly new. It was captured brilliantly as long ago as 2002 in Michael Winterbottom’s docudrama In This World, which followed the journey of two 14-year-old Afghani boys from a refugee camp in Peshawar. What they wanted was to get to Britain, using a long chain of smugglers to make the journey.
The gangs facilitate this traffic; they do not create it. So the answer is to suppress the demand. A policy that is rhetorically, or even practically, aimed primarily at “smashing the gangs” is doomed to fail.
Why do politicians do this? Labour ministers in particular are reluctant to acknowledge that it is not the gangs but their clients who perpetuate the problem, just as cocaine users are responsible for the drugs trade and all the crime associated with it. If people did not take drugs there would be no smugglers.
Illegal migration is driven by the demand of potentially millions who want to come to the UK because they think they can get work and start a new life, underpinned by a welfare state that anyone can get access to whether they have contributed or not.
If, having made a journey from central Asia, you know you will be picked up in the Channel, taken to the UK, given a hotel room to stay in and pocket money on which to live, why would you not do it? Moreover, you also know from friends or relatives who have made the trip that if you get to Britain you will almost certainly be allowed to stay because so few are ever deported. Indeed, more than half are given asylum, even though most have arrived as economic migrants and do not obviously qualify on the grounds, laid out in the Refugee Convention, that they face a real risk of persecution. If you fail then you can use human rights laws to challenge any refusal.
It was notable that Sir Keir’s “anger” on this subject did not extend to lawyers who make a good living trying to thwart efforts to remove people whom the Home Office has decreed should be deported.
The best way of stopping the traffic would be to blockade the beaches and return every migrant to France, but the French won’t allow that whatever international deal is struck. So the solution lies in Britain where only by addressing all the pull factors can progress be made. This means holding migrants in camps, not hotels, clamping down on working in the black economy, denying access to free health care, removing all benefits, blocking any prospect of long-term settlement and swiftly removing illegal immigrants, with no appeal.
But no one is prepared to do any of this because it is politically difficult and in breach of many of the UK’s international treaty obligations. That is why the Conservatives in the end decided the only deterrent left was to process asylum seekers somewhere else, in Rwanda, a scheme that Labour undermined and then scrapped.
All that Sir Keir is proposing is to replicate past failure with a new border agency, a crackdown on rogue employers, further international agreements to deal with criminality and repackaged co-operation among intelligence agencies and police.
It is as if none of this has been tried before. The Prime Minister seems to believe that flinty-eyed determination and strong words about vile gangs will succeed where past governments have failed. It is Einstein’s definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.
In his speech on Monday, Sir Keir recalled visiting a refugee camp in Calais in 2016 where people were waiting to make the crossing to Britain. “That infamous camp has long since gone but the evil of the people smuggling businesses that put people there, that remains,” he said.
“The gangs remain. That exploitation of desperation, misery and false hope – that all remains.”
But the point is that it is not a false hope. For many thousands who have paid a lot of money to get here it is a risk worth taking. Until Sir Keir understands this, and acts accordingly, he faces precisely the same failure that confounded his Tory predecessors.