On his first day in office, newly elected Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer reportedly scrapped the plan to send illegal boat migrants to Rwanda rather than putting them up in hotels in Britain.
The scheme to send illegals to have their often spurious asylum claims in processing centres in the East African nation of Rwanda first put forward by ex-PM Boris Johnson in 2022 to deal with the migrant crisis in the English Channel has been abandoned by the left-wing Labour government on its first day, a party insider told The Telegraph.
The insider told the broadsheet that the plan is “dead”, adding: “If Rishi Sunak thought Rwanda would work, he wouldn’t have called an election. It was a con. By calling an election, Sunak was acknowledging that fact.”
This assessment mirrors claims made before the election by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who claimed that Sunak had called the election early to avoid the embarrassment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) blocking migrant removal flights as it did in the summer of 2022, sparking years of legal wrangling and putting all removals to Rwanda on hold.
However, unlike Farage, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government has rejected the notion of the UK withdrawing from the Strasbourg-based court, the membership of which was unaffected by Brexit given that the ECHR is technically a separate institution from the European Union, despite being closely aligned.
Indeed, Starmer — a strong opponent of Brexit — has suggested that he would seek closer ties with the EU on immigration, including potentially taking in a quota of EU migrants per year in exchange for a returns policy to allow the UK to send illegals back to the bloc.
The scrapping of the Rwanda policy — which the Conservatives claimed would act as a deterrence for future boat migrants — means that the government would likely have to forfeit the £270 million already sent to Kigali, however, it would no longer have to send the next two instalments of £50 million in 2025 and 2026.
Labour’s plan to confront the migrant crisis would seek to step up enforcement against the people smuggling gangs operating on both sides of the English Channel and go after unscrupulous business owners in Britain who hire illegals.
The British government has already committed nearly half a billion pounds in taxpayer money to send to the French to step up enforcement, however, this has yielded limited results.
Nigel Farage, who will finally enter Parliament after decades in the political sphere, has argued that the government should task the Royal Navy to immediately return boat migrants back to the beaches of France, and to cut off payments to Paris if the French navy continues to escort migrants into British territorial waters.