After two years in office, Labour may have begun to realise the Tories were right. One of Keir Starmer’s earliest acts as Prime Minister was to scrap what he called a ‘gimmick’ – the Tories’ Rwanda scheme, under which illegal arrivals were to be deported to the African country. At the time some 52,000 migrants had been identified for deportation, but Starmer said it had ‘never been a deterrent’, and instead promised to ‘smash’ the people smuggling gangs.
Now, with Starmer gone, and after two years of ‘smash the gangs’ around 80,000illegal migrants have crossed the Channel, representing almost 40 per cent of all small boat arrivals since records began in 2018. In government, Labour have made no serious effort to eliminate ‘pull factors’, and indeed actually added some new ones when they scrapped the Tories’ Illegal Migration Act, under which those who arrive here illegally would never be allowed to settle. Meanwhile, asylum approval rates remain very high, despite the widespread belief amongst those who make asylum decisions that the majority of asylum claims are fake. Even those whose asylum claims are rejected, and who lose every appeal in our soft-touch immigration tribunals, almost certainly won’t be deported.
