A UK Labour government would seek to negotiate an agreement with the EU on migration control, party leader Keir Starmer has said, in contrast to the policies pursued by the current Conservative cabinet.
The Labour leader, whose party continues to hold a 15-point opinion poll lead over the governing Conservative party, was in the Hague on Thursday (14 September) for meetings at Europol, the EU’s police agency.
Starmer said that the meetings with Europol had focused on tackling the human smuggling groups operating across Europe and that he had stressed the need for “a better agreement to share intelligence and have joint operations to take these gangs down.”
The opposition party has denied Conservative claims that it would seek to reverse Brexit if elected at the next general election, to be held in 2024, promising that it will not take the UK back into the single market or re-introduce freedom of movement.
However, it has mooted the prospect of a cooperation pact on migration and lifting trade barriers on agricultural products should it be elected.
Like in the EU, migration control remains a major political issue in the UK with rising numbers of Channel crossings this year.
Rishi Sunak’s government backs a £100m ‘cash for migrant control’ deal with Rwanda that could see asylum seekers flown to the East African country while their claims are processed, but the scheme has not been implemented after being dismissed as illegal by the UK Court of Appeal.
In an interview with the Times on Thursday, Starmer said that any talks on migrant quotas “would be part of any discussions and negotiations with Europe”.
In response, Sunak’s government has claimed that a returns agreement based on proposed EU migration rules would result in the UK taking more than 100,000 illegal migrants from the EU each year, a figure described by Starmer as “nonsense”.
After years of disagreement, EU governments found a compromise in July – despite continued opposition from Poland and Hungary – under which member states that refuse to take migrants would pay €20,000 per migrant into a fund managed by the European Commission.
Ministers and MEPs are still deadlocked on a handful of other laws designed to overhaul the EU’s immigration and asylum rules.
Next week Starmer will meet French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris as part of a diplomatic tour to build up his international profile.
The next UK general election will be followed, one year later, by a review of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) which came into force following the UK’s exit from the EU’s single market in 2021.
However, European Commission officials have played down the prospect of the review being used to re-open political or trade terms with London. Instead, they say that the review will be purely technical, designed to ensure full implementation of the existing deal.
[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]
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