Cooper defends Labour examining Italy’s migrant policies – UK politics live

Keir Starmer has had a breakfast meeting with business leaders in Rome this morning. He told them the UK and Italy were “very close allies, obviously partners in the G7, partners in Nato, very strong bilateral relations”. He said his government’s top priority was growth. And, according to the PA Media report, he also had a message that may have been aimed more at the audience at home.

You will be familiar with this in your businesses, if you’re turning around business, if you’re turning around the company, and you know there are difficult decisions to make, it’s better to do them early on.

That’s a comment about next month’s budget.

Good morning. Rishi Sunak had a good relationship with Giorgia Meloni, the leader of a far-right party who became PM in Italy around the same time he did in the UK, and he took a very close interest in what her government is doing to stop irregular migration into her country by boat. Keir Starmer has abandoned Sunak’s Rwanda scheme, but not everything has changed in Whitehall and today he is in Italy for talks with Meloni and to see if he can learn anything that might help Labour reduce small boat crossings.

In a press release about the trip, Downing Street said:

As part of the visit Keir Starmer will discuss with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni her country’s success in tackling irregular migration. Italy has seen a 60 per cent drop in irregular migration by sea over the past year thanks to tough enforcement and international cooperation.

As Aletha Adu and Rajeev Syal report, this has not gone down well with some Labour MPs, and with charities that support refugees.

We will hear Starmer himself speak at a press conference later, but this morning Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, has been doing a media round and this is what she told Sky News when its presenter, Kay Burley, asked her why Labour was interested in learning from a hard-right European government. Cooper replied:

Well, we’ve always worked with other democratically elected countries, including those led by political parties that we’re not aligned with. The last Labour government did that. Other governments have done that. That’s just always been the case. It’s part of making sure that we are pursuing Britain’s interests, working internationally with other governments.

The areas that I think are important in terms of working with Italy are particularly around tackling organised immigration crime, the smuggler and the trafficking gangs. Italy has been doing this, they have made some significant progress on doing this.

And also on the partnership working that they’ve been doing with other countries, working upstream to prevent dangerous journeys in the first place. And there’s been a 60% reduction in boat crossings across the Mediterranean to Italy. That means that fewer lives being put at risk in the Mediterranean. It also means addressing some of these border security issues. We do need to work with other countries on this.

The Italian government is also preparing to send asylum seekers to Albania to have their claims processed and Starmer has hinted that he might consider adopting a similar plan. The Alabanian plan is not the same as the Tories’ Rwanda plan; Rwanda was a pure deportation scheme – anyone being sent there could claim asylum, but only in Rwanda, not in the UK, because it involved a blanket ban on people arriving in small boats claiming asylum in the UK. The Albanian plan is just about offshore processing; people will still be able to claim asylum in Italy, but they will be held in Albania while their applications are processed.

But the similarities (people arriving by boat being taken to a third country) have spooked some campaigners, and on Sky News Burley asked why an Albanian-type scheme might be acceptable to Labour when the Rwanda scheme wasn’t. Cooper replied:

The Italian arrangement with Albania is not yet up and running, and we will be interested to see how that develops. We’ve always said we would look at what works. It is a very different kind of programme from the Rwanda one.

The Rwanda scheme was run for two and a half years by the Conservatives. They spent £700m on sending four volunteers to Rwanda. That is not a workable programme.

The arrangement that Italy has with Albania is a very different one. It’s effectively around having a fast-track for those who have arrived from predominantly safe countries, and is also a scheme that is monitored by the UNHCR as well to make sure that proper standards are in place. We will see how it develops. We have always said we will look and see what works in any country.

Asked to confirm that the government was considering an Albanian-type scheme, Cooper said “we’ll see how the Italy-Albania arrangement develops”. But the government’s priority was tackling the gangs, she said. When Burley asked her again if Albania was an option, Cooper replied:

It’s not in place at the moment, so no. As we’ve always said, we will look at anything that works. But no, that’s not the scheme that we’re looking at at the moment. What we’re looking at at the moment is developing new Europol taskforces.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am (UK time): Keir Starmer visits the Italian border operations control room. He is due to record a pooled clip for broadcasters. Later he has got a lunch meeting with the Italian PM, Giorgia Meloni, and at 1pm (UK time) they are due to hold a press conference.

11am: Daisy Cooper, the deputy Lib Dem leader and health spokesperson, speaks at the Lib Dem conference in Brighton. Jane Dodds, the speaker of the Welsh Lib Dems, is speaking in the afternoon, and during the day there are debates on topics including proportional representation and how well the party did at the election (in the morning) and Gaza and prisons policy (in the afternoon).

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