Keir Starmer has made an art out of the need to criticize the Conservative Party’s big mistakes without scaring away voters who view those mistakes sympathetically. Regarding Brexit, the Labor leader promised better management of the new reality, and a new relationship with the EU, without questioning the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the club. Regarding Rishi Sunak’s deportation plan to Rwanda, Starmer focuses his criticism on the uselessness of a measure – “a policy of gestures”, he calls it, or “insult to intelligence” – that will only send a few hundred irregular immigrants to that country. African country, without pointing out its lack of humanity. In return, the man whom all polls place as the next prime minister of the United Kingdom has promised to strengthen police controls and create a new border security command with the powers and capabilities granted by anti-terrorism legislation, to hit hard at the mafias that transport human beings across the English Channel.
“Illegal immigration – Starmer also uses that term, instead of the definition of irregular immigration suggested by the UN – has become the definitive test of the seriousness of any Government. (…) No one should be confused, we are facing criminal activity,” he said this Friday in Deal, on the southeast coast of England, where more people are arriving after a dangerous crossing through the waters of the channel.
So far in 2024, more than 8,000 people have already made that trip, at a pace that is approaching the record set in 2022, with more than 45,000.
“We are going to eliminate the Rwanda plan completely and immediately, and that means that there will be no flights,” Starmer assured, to settle the doubts created in recent days about the possibility that a hypothetical Labor Government would maintain, even if it were temporarily, the deportation policy. “We will end this farce and return seriousness to the control of our borders. “We are going to address the roots of the problem,” the Labor leader promised.
Counterterrorism capabilities
Starmer knows that, on immigration, voters do not trust Labor much more than they trust the Conservative Government, according to all polls. After the economy or public health, it is the most delicate political issue. For this reason, the opposition candidate has replicated part of the argument used by Sunak and his government: compassion with immigrants, toughness with the networks that help them cross the border, although the same result is pursued: stopping the entry of more people in the country.
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Drawing on his years of experience at the head of the Crown Prosecution Service, Starmer has promised that he will use the more than €700 million allocated to the Rwanda plan to create a new command that brings together the capabilities and powers of various security departments, to confront the challenge of immigration. “It is about proposing a new strategy, with the capabilities offered by anti-terrorist legislation, to avoid the current fragmentation that exists in the Border Police,” he explained. “We will join in the effort hundreds of special investigators, the best agents of the National Crime Agency, the Border Police, the Immigration forces, the Crown Prosecution Service and, yes, also MI5 (the intelligence service for internal security)”, Starmer promised.
The opposition leader offers an approach similar to that used by the last Labor Government, that of Tony Blair, to create the Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism, which brought together the skills of various agencies. The anti-terrorist capabilities proposed by Starmer would allow, for example, the possibility of investigating and detaining people suspected of being involved in immigrant trafficking without a prior court order; the option of ordering the seizure of bank accounts or restricting freedom to travel, as well as the tapping of telephones or computer data.
Part of Starmer’s proposals, his critics have pointed out, are nothing more than a copy of others previously tried without success by the Conservative Government. The moment, however, is different. Faced with the image of desperation and improvisation offered by Sunak, and his determination to launch flights to Rwanda at all costs, the suggestion to strengthen controls and provide a larger budget to the asylum application processing system, also raised by the Labor leader, has garnered praise from professional law enforcement experts.
“The new Border Security Command proposed by the Labor Party not only puts all existing assets in order under the leadership of new management, but establishes direct accountability to the Home Office and expanded powers,” he said. written Neil Basu, former director of the Metropolitan Police’s anti-terror unit between 2015 and 2021 in the newspaper The Daily Telegraph, the conservatives’ reference publication. “Starmer is right to draw parallels between the efforts deployed to combat terrorism and the work we need to put in place at our borders,” he added.
At the beginning of May, British police launched an operation to begin detaining irregular migrants on British territory whose asylum application has been denied and who have been selected for the first deportations to Rwanda. After arresting a few dozen, outside the hotels where they had until now been provided with accommodation or the offices where they regularly met with the immigration agent in their charge, the Ministry of the Interior has admitted that thousands of them have disappeared. of the radar. The threat of their transfer to the African country has caused many of them to choose hiding.
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