Sir Keir Starmer’s legalistic solution to tackling the small boats crisis is simply not radical enough to reassure the public he’s got a grip.
This weekend the Government announced plans to downgrade judges’ powers, with failed asylum seekers’ appeal cases heard instead by a panel of experts in the hope decision-making will become quicker.
In theory it will lead to faster processing for migrants, who are stuck in expensive hotels for a year on average awaiting their hearings.
Officials say it will slash the backlog, and deportations will surge. However, the Conservatives have already cautioned that less experienced panels will simply approve more applicants.
But the public, even those not adorning lampposts with St George’s flags, don’t trust that Starmer is being sufficiently robust, with Reform predictably benefiting from public anger. A YouGov poll for The Times found that 71 per cent of voters believe that the Prime Minister is handling the asylum hotel issue badly, including 56 per cent of Labour voters.
Despite strident efforts by the Conservatives – both shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick and shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp have made a show of visiting the south coast – to explain how they would deal with the small boats, they are too closely associated with the last Tory government’s decision to place migrants in hotels to solve housing shortages. Meanwhile Labour has failed to deliver on its pledge to abolish the policy.
After a summer of negative headlines and migration-focused campaigns from Reform UK and the Tories, nearly four in 10 voters (37 per cent) said that immigration and asylum was the most important issue facing the country. Come the Budget, tax rises and a decline in crossings over the winter months, the economy will likely rocket back up the agenda.
But for now, Nigel Farage is making hay. On Tuesday, the Reform leader will make his latest statement from an airport hangar in Oxfordshire, representing the mass deportations he has planned. Those who arrive in Britain via small boats should be arrested, held in old RAF bases, denied asylum, and deported in a month, he will say.
Only last autumn, Farage shied away from the concept of “mass deportations”, describing the idea as “a political impossibility”. Fuelled by White House rhetoric, his increasingly aggressive language is now met with a shrug. Few politicians have criticised Farage’s plan to deny sanctuary to illegal arrivals and return migrants to dangerous countries.
Farage will declare the UK should quit the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and ditch the Human Rights Act, and then implement a British bill of rights. It would also derogate from other international treaties. Reform said it would seek deals with countries like Afghanistan and Eritrea, despite concerns about their human rights records.
It’s not just Farage. Every major party has shifted right on this matter. In Government, Starmer’s ministers are drumming their fingers awaiting the late autumn release of a review about Article 8 of the ECHR, the section dealing with a person’s right to a private and family life.
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Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, initiated the study in March, aiming to investigate worries that asylum seekers were leveraging family and private life protections to halt deportation and minimise “exceptional” case classifications.
But Starmer is being urged to go further and faster. David Blunkett, a former home secretary and Labour grandee, has said Labour needs radical measures to win back public trust on immigration.
“I think that the individual measures the Government has taken are extremely helpful in their own right but don’t add up either to a comprehensive answer or an understandable narrative,” he told The Times.
Blunkett, who has always been to the right of the Labour movement, said that he was not in favour of leaving the ECHR but said he was in favour of a “temporary suspension”.
“It’s not unprecedented,” he said. “It’s a blunderbuss measure but sometimes things have moved so rapidly you need to indicate decisive action.”
At the Tories’ October conference, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch will explain her party’s ECHR exit plan, a hardening of her earlier position.
This week she is instructing councillors how to challenge migrant hotels in their areas, after the High Court granted an injunction that will force the Home Office to relocate up to 138 male asylum seekers from a hotel in Epping in a matter of days.
Badenoch will chair a meeting on Tuesday attended by, among others, Lord Charles Banner KC, a planning law expert, the Chair of Conservative County Councillors John Cope and Holly Whitbread, a Tory cabinet member at Epping Forest council. She wants local Tories to lead the way in challenging the migrant hotels in their areas.
Low Government spending on the problem matches Starmer’s legal tinkering. By 2028-29, Rachel Reeves has promised up to £280m more annually for the new Border Security Command. Compare and contrast with Donald Trump’s $170bn (£126bn) plan for immigration enforcement over four years.
Labour is being seriously outflanked, and ministers know it. Whether Starmer – who as a lawyer wrote a legal handbook on human rights – can bring himself to distance himself from the ECHR is far less certain.
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