Sending asylum-seekers to Rwanda would, of course, be a moral outrage. We know this because Labour shadow ministers kept telling us so when the previous government wanted to do just this. Fortunately, however, there is a far more ethical alternative: to send them to Albania instead – something which Keir Starmer is considering after meeting with Italian prime minister Georgia Meloni to learn how her government has successfully reduced small boat arrivals over the past year. Starmer said he was ‘interested’ to see how the Albania processing scheme developed by the Italian government would work.
This is just one example of a schizophrenic government weighing up a policy which is almost identical to the one it has condemned
Let’s brush over the left’s attitude towards Meloni: when Rishi Sunak was establishing a rapport with her last year she was a neo fascist; now she suddenly seems to have graduated to being a respectable national leader with lots of ideas to offer our own enlightened, grown up government. But does anyone else detect a whiff of hypocrisy in Labour’s flip-flop over the principle of sending asylum-seekers abroad for processing? Apparently a white European country can be trusted to look after migrants sent from the UK but not an African one.
Labour ministers might argue that the Albania scheme is different from the Rwanda one. They could say that, in the former case, asylum-seekers will have a chance of returning to Britain if the applications are successful, while in the latter they would have had to remain in Rwanda. Yet that is an academic distinction if you are a genuine refugee who is fleeing for your life. The asylum system is, after all, supposed to function on the basis that you seek shelter in the first country in which you arrive.
Let’s put it charitably and say this is just one more example of a schizophrenic government weighing up a policy which is almost identical to the one it has spent the past few years condemning. Public finances? It was evil ‘austerity’ when the Tories tried to balance the books; now it is a responsible fiscal policy to means-test winter fuel payments and to chop infrastructure projects like the Stonehenge tunnel. There is a ‘black hole’ in the public finances – except, that is, when it comes to public sector pay rises, whereupon there is a mound of money available.
A few weeks ago there were far too many people in prison; up to half of them shouldn’t be there, the new prisons minister told us. Then came the riots and suddenly prison, after all, was exactly the place for thugs and minor criminals. Oh, until a week ago when the doors of the jails were flung open and hundreds of prisoners released early.
Starmer has previously been accused of ‘flip-flopping’ on important issues, but that term implies that there is at least some degree of time-elapse between the holding of contradictory opinions. The Prime Minister now appears to have developed the ability to hold contrary positions simultaneously. There is a very simple rule governing this: any idea the Conservatives propose is bad and wrong; but the Labour-branded version is just fine.
A Labour government, though, does have an advantage when it comes to a policy like sending asylum-seekers overseas. The official opposition – i.e. the Tories – are unlikely to be oppose. The main opposition will surely derive from within the Labour party. But with a majority of 170 that is unlikely to matter.