This is not so much a political “dog-whistle” as an entire canine chorus. It resonates with voters who have had adverse experiences of the impacts of immigration, but it also spreads suspicion and a keynote of hostility more broadly. Even a few years ago, such language would have been rebutted by Labour.
Wrong then, wronger now. Labour is confronting a Reform party which is often unscrupulous with the figures about the real-terms risk of crime being committed by migrants, but has had a better gut understanding of the public mood and the reaction likely to be engendered by boats in which four our of five of the incomers are young adult males. The numbers crossing the English Channel have hit more 25,000 this year, which suggests tackling that entry route, as Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, pointed out last week is a long and arduous process.
square KITTY DONALDSON Starmer's whack-a-mole against small boats has reached breaking point
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Shabana Mahmood, the Justice Secretary, has said that she will expedite the removal of foreign criminals from prisons. The practicalities, however, may lag behind the intentions, as Mahmood put it in her adopted tabloid-speak, to “send [them] packing” in record time.
There is, however, a catch – or indeed several. Home countries tend to be unkeen on re-admitting hardened criminals. The spectre of another tussle with the European Court of Human Rights beckons, over the provision that the right to a family life can be used to halt deportations – and in practical terms, string out an appeals process. In essence, Labour has shifted ground on the Human Rights Act it once fervently supported, arguing that public safety and national security should outweigh the protections bestowed through the ECHR and absorbed into UK law.
That is not a sentiment we are likely to hear from the Starmer of 2025. In fairness, a shared recognition across many European countries attractive to irregular migrants is that deportation systems are too cumbersome to be a deterrent to crime or illegal entry. The Ministry of Justice’s own figures show the number of foreigners in prison to be at peak levels.
The success of this depends, to a large extent, whether the origin countries of those targeted can be persuaded, by leveraging aid or threatening to withhold visas for regular entrants, to take convicted criminals back. And in many cases – including Syria and Afghanistan – the domestic political situation means that the country of return is unlikely to be open to deals. So the plan will have to focus on countries like Albania, Romania and Poland, where the Government has good relations and strong diplomatic leverage.
At that point, processing deals like the Tories’ thwarted Rwanda plan look rather more enticing than playing cat-and-mouse with boats in the Channel – if the Government could source a less problematic country as an “offshoring” hub for processing asylum applications.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor at Politico and host of Politics at Sam and Anne’s
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