In recent months, the man who looks increasingly likely to be Britain’s next prime minister has been treading a cautious line. Keir Starmer has made clear that under his leadership a first-term Labour government would stick to tough fiscal rules, and has ruled out making any unfunded spending commitments in the run-up to the next election. That has fuelled criticism from some on the left of his party, who argue that this has limited the extent to which he has been able to differentiate a possible future Labour government from the present Conservative one.
But last week Starmer drew a sharp dividing line between the government and Labour on asylum policy. This government has effectively destroyed the tenets of a workable asylum policy. It has allowed huge delays to develop in processing asylum claims: earlier this year, 83% of claims made in 2018 had not been processed five years later. It has removed the right of anyone arriving in the UK through irregular means to apply for asylum and introduced measures to detain them until they can be deported to another safe country for their claim to be processed. This not only potentially breaks international law, it is impractical, as it will create a growing underclass of tens and eventually hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers – the vast majority of whom would qualify for refugee status – whom the government has pledged to detain at a probable cost of billions to the taxpayer while it tries to strike a deportation deal with a safe third country. (Rwanda, the only country that has reached an agreement with the UK, has been ruled unsafe by the British courts.)
Starmer has outlined a very different approach. He has said that a Labour government would be even tougher on criminal smuggling gangs, extending the use of the serious crime prevention orders already used to target terrorists and drug traffickers in order to restrict the movement and freeze assets of people smugglers. It remains to be seen how effective this would be; this sort of people smuggling is notoriously difficult to disrupt.
The real difference is that Labour would scrap the government’s unworkable and cruel detention and deportation policies, restoring the right of people to claim asylum in the UK established in the 1951 refugee convention. Instead, Labour will invest in 1,000 extra case workers and a returns unit of 1,000 staff to process claims much more quickly and deport those whose claims are rejected. That is a far better approach.
Starmer will also try to negotiate an agreement with the EU in which the UK would accept a quota of refugees in exchange for being able to return those who cross the Channel in small boats. The government has attacked Labour for this pragmatic stance, although it has previously unsuccessfully tried to negotiate just such a deal. This is perhaps the part of Labour’s plan least likely to succeed; pan-European cooperation has never worked well in the bloc and has broken down further in recent years. But it is the right approach: irregular migration will be a growing global phenomenon, driven by political instability, economic poverty and the climate crisis. Countries such as Italy and Greece cannot be left to cope unilaterally; the problem requires a coordinated response from Europe, and the UK should be part of that.
So Labour has carved out a different and distinctive approach from the government, which is pursuing an unworkable policy in the hope of fooling voters into thinking it has the solution. This commonsense, humane pragmatism from Labour makes for a refreshing change from the populist promises from Conservative politicians pretending there are easy answers to complex problems.
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