Deportation talk is all the rage in this summer of bubbling anger and a sense of government drift. The answer – or at least the promise of an answer – is a renewed focus on the link between crime and high immigration. A focus which many liberals chose to ignore or relativise has moved from the speeches of Reform leader Nigel Farage – who has argued that sex crimes featuring Afghan men are far more common than in the British-born population – and Robert Jenrick, the shadow Justice Secretary, who expressed fears of his own daughters encountering “men from backward countries who broke into Britain illegally”.
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.
Given public feeling that immigration rates have been consistently too high and deterrence to illegal asylum ineffective, it is a rare Labour figure who argues, as one senior civil servant close to the leadership did to me not so long ago, that the small boats issue should not be taken too seriously, because it largely represents displacement from other routes of entry, such as hiding in lorries, which mainly impacted a few south coast areas.
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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A government which is always in near-panic mode about how to show and tell progress is turning to a different focus on which it believes it can demonstrate impact: tackling the link between crime and immigration.
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.
New legislation due to come into force next month opens up the deportation route to prisoners after serving 30 per cent of their term behind bars (rather than half of the sentence as is the case at present). Now, Labour seems to find even its own policies too laggardly: Mahmood is highlighting a push to see sex offenders, drug dealers and serious burglary convicts removed straight after sentencing to their home countries.
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.
Keir Starmer, who frequently invoked the Human Rights Act as one of the triumphs of the liberal international system, frequently appears to be arguing against his own former beliefs. In 2015, he wrote a critique of Tory proposals to limit the application of the Human Rights Act in deportation cases, saying “it should not be viewed suspiciously as a burden, but promoted as an instrument of social cohesion and public purpose.”
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.
To appear effective, the Government will need to show that it can make good on hopes to see up to 3,000 foreign offenders removed from England and Wales earlier than would have been the case – and barred from re-entry to the UK.
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.
But the question Labour must answer more clearly is not just about what it wants to do with offenders who have come to Britain through both open and furtive routes, but how it intends to bring down immigration numbers and to what level or criteria. The crime element is really a function of overall concerns about numbers, as well as worries about law-breakers.
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.
Deportations now signal a more hostile environment to foreign offenders. The bigger question is what levels and criteria for immigration and asylum does the Government now believe to be correct, when it has changed its mind on so much else? On that, the summer sound is silence.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor at Politico and host of Politics at Sam and Anne’s
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