Keir Starmer is under pressure from Labour backbenchers and NGOs to distance his government from Giorgia Meloni’s hard-right immigration policies on the eve of bilateral talks in Rome.
After the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, said the UK would consider copying Italy’s plans to process asylum applicants in a third country such as Albania, one backbencher questioned why a Labour administration was “seeking to learn lessons from a neo-fascist government”.
The Refugee Council and Amnesty International have called on Starmer to avoid any more “gimmicks” after the failure of the last government to implement the Rwanda scheme.
Eight men died while trying to cross the Channel in the early hours of Sunday morning.
A 10-month-old baby with suspected hypothermia was among 53 people rescued off the coast of Ambleteuse in the Pas-de-Calais region of northern France when their dinghy was “smashed” on to rocks.
The prime minister will head to Rome on Monday to examine how Meloni’s government has cut the number of people arriving in dinghies across the Mediterranean by almost two-thirds in the past year, from 118,000 to 44,500.
Meloni has focused on financial deals with north African countries such as Tunisia and Libya to improve their border security so they can stop boats setting off across the sea.
This autumn she will go further by opening a holding centre in Albania, where asylum seekers picked up at sea by Italian rescue ships will be taken while their asylum applications are processed.
Kim Johnson, the Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside and a former member of the home affairs select committee, said the agenda for the bilateral meeting was “disturbing”.
“Meloni’s approach to Albanian migration has been described as a ‘model of mismanagement and a blueprint for abuse’ by Human Rights Watch. It is disturbing that Starmer is seeking to learn lessons from a neo-fascist government – particularly after the anti-refugee riots and far-right racist terrorism that swept Britain this summer.
“Have we learned nothing from the Tories’ failures? Higher security and draconian deportation measures fail to dissuade desperate people from seeking asylum, and risk significant human rights violations.
“Instead, we should be focusing our efforts on the serious failures in our current asylum system – reduce the backlog of claims, end no recourse to public funds and restrictions on work, and strive to implement a just and humane system for asylum seekers and migrants.”
A second Labour MP said “cosying up to Meloni is shameful … she is all about dehumanising and mistreating people fleeing war and persecution. This leaves a very bad taste in the mouths of many people in our party.”
Lammy told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme that Starmer will talk to Meloni about her efforts to tackle irregular migration “and the work they have done, particularly, with Albania”.
He said: “They have a comprehensive scheme with Albania understanding that [the] Albania route, as well as the Channel and the southern Mediterranean, are routes which migrants use. So of course, because it has reduced the numbers, we are interested in discussing with Italy the schemes they have developed, not just with Albania.”
But in a sign of government confusion over the issue, a Home Office source said that Lammy’s claim that the UK government could send people to a third country such as Albania was not government policy.
“It is not something we are working on,” the source said, adding that Italy’s plan to process 3,000 asylum seekers in Albania has not reduced the levels of irregular migration because it has not yet begun processing asylum seekers there.
Whitehall is keen to examine Italy’s tough enforcement against people-smuggling gangs, plans to open a hub in Sarajevo to coordinate enforcement against human trafficking and 5.5bn euros of funding for pilot projects across Africa.
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On Sunday night the police chief who oversaw the UK’s enforcement of lockdown laws during the Covid-19 pandemic was appointed the head of the government’s new Border Security Command.
Martin Hewitt, the former chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, will be in charge of coordinating Starmer’s plans to curb small boat crossings.
Steve Valdez-Symonds, Amnesty International UK’s refugee and migrant rights director, said there “should be no question of the UK doing deals to offload its responsibilities on to other countries – not Albania, Rwanda or anywhere else.
“After the last government’s shameful attempt at this, the last thing needed is yet another government pursuing schemes to avoid fulfilling the UK’s comparatively modest refugee obligations.”
Jon Featonby, the chief analyst at the Refugee Council, said such deals are “incredibly expensive” and have resulted in men, women and children being trapped in countries where they face the risk of torture, murder, rape and imprisonment.
“The government should think very carefully before seeking to absolve itself of responsibility under international law to give people a fair hearing on UK soil by emulating these schemes.”
Frontex, the EU’s border agency, revealed in July that migration had fallen by 61% on the central Mediterranean route in the first six months of the year, with sources suggesting that Tunisia was taking more interest in cracking down on people-smugglers who last summer launched between 40 and 50 boats a day to Italy.
Starmer’s government has been prepared to accept criticisms from those on the left of his party over immigration, mindful that the issue remains a key electoral battleground in seats recently won from the Tories.
One of Starmer’s first acts in office was to scrap the previous government’s plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, promising instead to focus on combatting people-smuggling gangs, particularly those operating on the north coast of France.
It is less than two weeks since 12 people died when their boat sank trying to cross the Channel. A pregnant woman and six children were among those killed in the incident on 3 September, with up to 65 people rescued off the coast of Cap Gris-Nez.
On Saturday, 801 people crossed the Channel to the UK, according to provisional Home Office figures, the second-highest daily total so far this year.
On Monday, the prime minister will tour the National Coordination Centre for Migration in Rome to see first-hand how Italy responds to irregular migration and discuss future cooperation, before he is officially welcomed by the Italian prime minister.
Commenting specifically on whether Starmer believes Italy’s migration deal and strategy alone could help the UK’s approach to reducing illegal migration, the prime minister’s spokesperson said: “Both of our countries share the same challenge around irregular migration and the PM is very clear that to tackle what is an international challenge we have to have international solutions and work more closely together.”