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Starmer says Sunak’s plans to tackle small boats are ‘unworkable’
Keir Starmer is starting his LBC phone-in. Nick Ferrari is presenting.
Ferrari starts with small boats.
Starmer says: “The problem has got to be dealt with.”
He says the criminal gangs driving this must be dealt with. Labour would get the National Crime Agency to set up a unit to tackle people smugglers.
And it would speed up the processing of applications.
He says the Nationality and Borders Act was meant to “break the business model”. But the number of small boat crossings has risen, he says.
Q: Is what they are proposing doable?
Starmer says he is not sure it is. What if an Afghan arrives in the country, having fled the Taliban, and they had helped the UK military.
Q: Isn’t there a scheme for these people?
Starmer says that scheme was not working.
He says “this isn’t a workable plan”.
Putting forward “unworkable” plans is not going to help, he says.
Key events
Good morning. Rishi Sunak started the year with two urgent, intractable problems in his in-tray. Last week he unveiled a solution to the Northern Ireland protocol problem which has attracted more support, and less opposition, than had been expected. Tomorrow he will unveil his legislation to “stop small boats”.
Sunak announced the key elements of his plan in December. There has been more briefing over the weekend, but nothing that substantially alters what we were told three months ago, and nothing that addresses the claims made by many experts in asylum law who argue that trying to stop small boat crossings by legislating to say that people who arrive in the UK illegally will be banned from claiming asylum here just won’t work. The Nationality and Borders Act passed last year already says migrants arriving in the UK illegally are not eligible to claim asylum, but the small boats keep coming.
In our overnight story Rowena Mason and Rajeev Syal sum up the opposition to the plan here.
So what is going on? I can think of at least four options.
1) Sunak is relying on plans that won’t work because he’s daft. But he is not at all daft – quite the opposite – so we can discount that.
2) The critics are just wrong, and government sources are right when they say they have found a lawful way to process swift, mass removals. That seems unlikely, but you never know.
3) Sunak does not care whether the plans work or not, because he just wants to go into an election being able to blame Labour for the fact the government has not been able to deport asylum seekers en masse. There are probably some in the Conservative party who do favour this strategy, but it is risky. Polls suggest voters don’t blame Labour for asylum policy failing, but the govenrment.
4) There is some new fix not yet announced that would make the policy more plausible. One big problem the government has is that it does not have a returns agreement with France, or any other country in the EU, that would allow asylum seekers to be removed more easily. We don’t know if this will be part of the announcement, but Sunak is much better at striking deals with his EU counterparts than his two immediate predecessors, and he has a meeting with the French president at the end of this week.
Shortly we will hear what Keir Starmer has to say about this. This morning Lucy Moreton, from the Immigation Service Union, argued that the plans could increase the number of small boat crossings in the short term. Asked whether the plans would halt the crossings, she told the Today programme:
Not as things stand at the moment. In fact, it’s actually going to be the converse when these things are published and announced in this way.
What it actually does is fuel the service, if you like, that the criminals provide.
She argued that the people smuggling gangs would tell people “quick, cross now before anything changes”.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9am: Keir Starmer holds a ‘Call Keir’ phone-in on LBC.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
12pm: Kate Forbes, the SNP leadership candidate, is on a campaign visit in Kilmarnock. At 2.30pm Hamza Yousaf, another leadership candidate, is campaigning in Lanark.
2.30pm: Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
And at some point today Rishi Sunak is expected to speak to the French president, Emannuel Macron, ahead of the publication of his bill to deal with small boat crossings tomorrow and a meeting between the two leaders scheduled for Friday.
I’ll try to monitor the comments below the line (BTL) but it is impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it somewhere and I’m more likely to find it. I do try to answer questions, and if they are of general interest I will post the question and reply above the line (ATL), although I can’t promise to do this for everyone.
If you want to attract my attention quickly, it is probably better to use Twitter. I’m on @AndrewSparrow.
Alternatively, you can email me at andrew.sparrow@theguardian.com.
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