Albania’s prime minister laid into British asylum policy, arguing in an interview that the country is “in a very dark place” after Brexit.
Speaking to the Guardian, center-left PM Edi Rama accused Britain, currently led by Labour’s Keir Starmer, of looking for “places to dump immigrants” with its push for third-country “returns hubs” that would hold refused asylum seekers who have exhausted all legal pathways.
Starmer confirmed last month that the U.K. is in talks with other countries on such a plan, but would not say which countries it is speaking to. The British PM announced the policy during his first official visit to Albania.
However, Rama confirmed at the time Albania would not be part of the scheme as “we are loyal to our marriage with Italy.” Tiranë has a similar scheme with Rome which has been repeatedly held up by legal action.
Rama told the Guardian: “The fact that today it’s not just imaginable, it’s happening, is not because of Keir Starmer or [Rishi] Sunak doing something outrageous; it’s because of the country being in a very dark place.”
The Albanian PM said Starmer’s proposals were part of the “eighty percent of the things that are said, or are written, or are accepted as a normal part of the discourse in today’s Britain” and argued that before Brexit these “would have been totally unacceptable, totally ridiculous, totally shameful.”
Under the U.K.’s previous Conservative government, London and Tiranë signed a joint communiqué and set up a taskforce to tackle illegal migration that saw more than 1,000 Albanian nationals returned from Britain. However, relations between the two nations were often strained over politicians’ rhetoric about Albanian asylum seekers “invading” Britain.
Rama said Starmer was a “very decent [and] a delightful person” and made clear the British PM hadn’t made a public request for Albania to join the scheme.
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