Labor opposition leader Keir Starmer has launched a diplomatic offensive by attending a Europol meeting and pre-empting his willingness to do so If he becomes prime minister, he will sign an immigration deal with the EU. In the midst of the countdown to the 2024 general election, Labor leads the Conservative Party by 18 points, while Rishi Sunak has hit rock bottom in the polls: 67% of Brits have an “unfavorable” opinion of the “Prime Minister”. compared to 26% with a “positive” vision.
Starmer has taken advantage of the favorable winds in the polls to project his image as a future “prime minister” with an initial stop in The Hague and a subsequent meeting in France Emmanuel Macron and a jump to the other side of the Atlantic, with a possible visit to the president Joe Biden.
Its debut at the Europol conclave had a symbolic impact, as the UK lost its seat in the European security organization after Brexit (although its representatives can attend to facilitate cooperation). When we left the EU, access to databases was also lost which Starmer believes could be useful in tackling illegal immigration to the UK.
His plans for cooperation with the EU were interpreted by conservative media as an explicit desire to reverse Brexit and the policy of “taking back control” of the borders. Starmer himself, once a supporter of permanence, qualified his statements in front of the ITV cameras in The Hague…
“We have left the European Union. It’s not about returning to the EU.”, nor to integration into the internal market or the customs union, nor to the return to freedom of movement. “I made it clear what our parameters are.”
“But I don’t accept that this stops us from working with other European police forces and with prosecutors to dismantle human trafficking gangs,” the 61-year-old Labor leader said, citing his own background at the helm of the Attorney General’s Office in 2008 and 2013.
Starmer strongly criticized Sunak’s immigration fiasco and recalled that more than 40,000 immigrants have crossed the English Channel in boats since the controversial incident Suella Braverman She was appointed Minister of the Interior. Starmer assumed a hypothetical Labor government would equate human trafficking gangs with “terrorists” while encouraging greater cooperation with the EU on immigration and security.
According to Labor Party sources quoted by The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail, Starmer would be willing to take on “burden sharing” among immigrants of the 27, which could mean “more than 120,000 asylum seekers out of the million who arrived in EU territory last year”.
The UK broke its own record in 2023 215,000 pending cases of the asylum application. All attempts by successive Tory governments have failed due to the wave of “irregular” immigrants crossing the English Channel by boat in the last three years (mainly Albanians, Iranians and Afghans).
Starmer has expected that if he becomes Prime Minister, would automatically cancel the deportation plan to Rwanda The Labor leader, repeatedly paralyzed by the courts, has also reiterated his intention to press ahead with the suspension of the illegal immigration law recently passed by the British Parliament at the request of Rishi Sunak’s government.
