Labour’s migration plan is a French surrender

Another suicide pilot scheme

This article was first published in UnHerd. Everything I publish elsewhere is shared here for free, as a gift to the nation. But if you want the full picture, become a paid subscriber. It’s just a few quid a month; such is the price genius is reduced to.

Another week, another Labour announcement on immigration. The UK and France are reportedly close to singing a new migration agreement, a “one-in, one-out” deportation deal aimed at stemming the small boats crossings. The arrangement would see each migrant deported from Britain exchanged for an individual in France who has a legal right to reside in the UK, typically those with family reunification claims.

The pilot scheme being negotiated by Prime Minister Keir Starmer and President Emmanuel Macron is intended to undermine the business model of people-smuggling gangs by reinforcing the idea that illegal crossings will not lead to permanent settlement. The government hopes that the prospect of swift return to France will deter would-be migrants from attempting the dangerous journey.

The deal is in reaction to inexorably rising Channel crossing numbers, which have already exceeded those recorded at this point in each of the past three years - and are now widely expected to surpass 50,000 for the first time in a single year. It also follows a broader £480 million UK commitment to French border enforcement made last year under Rishi Sunak’s government, and a series od feals under previous Prime Ministers that have seen money sent to France and the people smuggling trade only ever accelerated.

Labour have backed themselves into a corner on Channel migration, and this latest deal is a symptom of their dysfunction. As I have written here before, this is a problem Labour would simply rather not have; they are therefore caught in a trap of tackling the problem as a systemic criminal one, the result only of the actions of criminal gangs, rather than one that places any agency on the migrants themselves – or on their own Government, for continuing conditions that are such a strong pull factor for migrants. And, by scrapping the Rwanda scheme, they stripped themselves of a credible deterrent that was having measurable effects in redirecting migration flows.

This new deal is little more than a headline, a technocratic reform that won’t tackle the structural factors driving high migration, but designed to sound close as to Farage’s ‘Net Zero’ immigration commitment as is possible.

Given that the numerous deals already struck with French authorities to stem the flow across the Channel have come at a high financial cost and delivered little impact, and that any deal negotiated by Keir Starmer must strike fear (into Britain), it is unclear whether we should be most concerned about the sheer cost the deal will no doubt have come at, or the unlikelihood that it will be successful. Huge questions remain; how high will France set the criteria for returns? What is the criteria for returns to the UK? What is the size of the French pool of potential returns? Will this result in Britain taking more migrants than it currently does? Given Labour’s desperation for a good headline and confused approach to immigration, nothing can be too ill-conceived to be off the table.

Paywalled postscript; This is the day (nothing will surely change)

This deal comes in to force today. Since I wrote this piece more has been unravelled about it and, as has come to be expected with the ‘deals’ Starmer makes, not much of it is good news.

The number of migrants that will be returned is obviously a key detail. In TV interviews yesterday, Yvette Cooper refused to answer how many; it’s widely expected to be only 800 this year, which isn’t much, but is a start. But given that makes the scheme ‘17 in, one out’, it does rather set Starmer up for mockery - especially when Farage is promising a ‘one in one out’ scheme.