Yes, I suppose Keir Starmer looked pretty stupid when he went to Albania on Thursday. He used a joint press conference with my old friend Edi Rama, the Albanian PM, to announce that the people of this blessed Mediterranean country would be privileged to receive any asylum seekers who happened to be rejected by the UK system.
The only trouble was that Edi, for some reason, was unaware of the good news. He was not prepared to offer a ‘returns hub’ for British cast-offs, he said, and summoning the spirit of the late king of Albania he told the UK PM to Zog off and have another look at the atlas.
Which totally ruined the point of the trip, and left Starmer opening and shutting his mouth with his trademark air of a stunned mullet.
It was a colossal No 10 goof, all right, but nothing like the worst mistake Starmer has made in his woke and hopeless attempt to stop the small boats.
He made the biggest mistake on day one in office in July last year, when he gleefully cancelled the Rwanda scheme.
Why did he nix that plan, when Whitehall departments had worked on it for months, and when it was on the point of fruition?
He axed Rwanda not because it was wrong or immoral; on the contrary it remains the right answer both for the UK and Rwanda, and above all right for the victims of the cross-Channel gangs.
He scrubbed that project not because it was too expensive. When you consider that it costs billions of pounds a year to keep these arrivals in hotels, the Rwanda plan would have paid for itself in a year.
No: he got rid of the Rwanda plan because it was before he understood the depths of public anger about the illegal crossings, before he appeared to preposterously adopt the mantle of Enoch Powell, and when he was still being true to his basic identity, as a politically correct human-rights-obsessed North London KC whose every instinct is to bend the law to help people to come to this country and to prevent them from being deported.
Sir Keir Starmer uses a joint press conference on Thursday with Edi Rama, the Albanian PM, to announce his asylum plan. The only trouble was that Edi, for some reason, was unaware of the good news
That was why he killed the Rwanda plan – and for those of us involved in the Herculean effort to set it up, it was, at the time, utterly infuriating. By July of last year, the Government had finally cleared all the legal obstacles. The Tories had even passed an Act of Parliament – officially designating Rwanda as a safe place for deportation.
We had signed a UK-Rwanda treaty by which the Rwandans agreed to observe certain standards in their reception centres. They had pledged not to send the arrivals to other countries. They were all set and, in the UK, there were hundreds of illegal immigrants who were about to be sent to Rwanda.
The first plane was due to leave on July 24 2024, and if it had, I believe the cross-Channel trade would have collapsed within three months.
The would-be boat people were already getting leery, if you remember; and at the mere mention of Rwanda, they were choosing to go to Ireland instead. As it was, we had the disaster of the early election, and the disaster of the Labour majority. Since when, the Starmer Government’s feeble approach has given the exact opposite signal to the gangs.
So far this year more than 12,000 people have made the dangerous and illegal crossing, more than ever before. There is nothing more corrosive of public trust in politics than government’s failure to stop this blatant law-breaking by illegal immigrants.
Public fury has reached boiling point – and that was why Starmer made his desperate and ill-prepared mission to Albania. That is why he is now babbling about offshore hubs – when, in reality, he has no plan. Even if Edi Rama had agreed to take some failed asylum-seekers in Albania, it would have made no difference.
The whole point is that most asylum appeals do not fail. The law is so complex that, for the vast majority of these illegal arrivals, the only thing that matters is getting a foothold in the UK.
After that the lawyers will do the rest, stringing out the applications over many years. That is why the hotels are bulging with illegal migrants. That is why it seems impossible to send anyone back. The beauty of the Rwanda scheme was that it did not allow for any such nonsense. If you arrived illegally by boat, then POW! – you were instantly on your way to Kigali.
That is why it was such a great deterrent. That is why it would have worked. That is why it was so utterly asinine of Starmer to cancel the plan. As he was being humiliated on TV by Edi Rama, 6ft 7in in his Dunlop green flash gym shoes, I expect the penny finally began to drop.
So, what else can he now do?
Illegal Channel crossings are 30 per cent up under Labour – and he knows it is one of the main reasons why his party was butchered in the local elections.
Starmer knows that he can’t rely on the French, who obstinately refuse to do enough to stop people leaving their beaches. Indeed, I have always thought that Macron stealthily encouraged a lax approach: weaponising the issue to undermine the confidence of the UK public in post-Brexit border control.
While the Belgians can be quite assertive in stopping the boats, turning them back even when they are in the water, the French are more hands-off. They seem to take it that their duty is to shepherd the dinghies into UK waters, where they become our responsibility.
In the middle of the Channel, it is simply too dangerous for our Navy or coastguard to push these frail vessels back to France – and against the law of the sea. Sometimes I wonder whether we should have gone tonto and put a 500 per cent tariff on Champagne and cheese – until they sorted it out.
Perhaps it would have worked, perhaps not. But in any case, Rwanda is a much better plan. People say – well, you lot had 14 years: why didn’t you do it earlier?
To which the obvious answer is that it was impossible as long as we were in the EU. The Rwanda plan goes against EU common rules on asylum, so we had to get Brexit done first – and then, with great effort, we had to find a suitable partner.
It took a long time to find the right country, and finally Priti Patel – then home secretary – did the deal with Paul Kagame of Rwanda. And then, just as we were on the verge of a real Australian-style solution to the illegal migrant problem, we had the disaster of the Labour Government.
Chris Philp, the current shadow home affairs spokesman, is the only voice currently offering a real plan and a real solution. He knows that a Rwanda type offshore processing hub – for all illegal migrants – must be part of it.
Starmer made a tragic mistake, a goof for which the whole country is still paying. He made a bish, as we used to say at school, a bish called Rwanda. It is time to reverse that mistake and bring back Rwanda!