LONDON — Keir Starmer promised a fresh blueprint to stop asylum-seekers arriving in the U.K. on small boats. But his ministers are facing the same old battles as his predecessors with the courts.
Hours before the first migrant was due to set off to France as part of his new “one in, one out” pilot program agreed with French President Emmanuel Macron in July, a High Court judge hit pause on the plan.
A “short period of interim relief” was granted Tuesday so lawyers can gather evidence of whether the unnamed migrant has been a victim of modern slavery, according to reports of the hearing.
It is a major blow for Starmer, who is under huge pressure to show results on tackling small boats after a summer of localized anti-migrant protests.
Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, which is leading Labour by 11 points in opinion polls, is amping up the pressure on the British prime minister over his asylum policy at a time when Starmer’s authority with his own party has been dented by the departure of three of his top team.
The political peril has not gone unnoticed in government. The court decision has gone down like a “bucket of sick,” one minister said.
Déjà vu
Starmer is not the first U.K. prime minister whose efforts to deter asylum-seekers arriving on small boats across the English Channel have been thwarted by the courts.
His Conservative predecessor Rishi Sunak, who staked his political career on a promise to “Stop the Boats,” was blocked from sending some people seeking asylum to Rwanda by the U.K. Supreme Court, which declared it was not a safe country.
In a bid to keep his deterrent policy alive, Sunak controversially legislated to declare Rwanda a safe country, and signed a new treaty with the East African nation — but the scheme was canceled by Starmer who claimed it was an expensive “gimmick.”
Britain’s prime minister signed his own deterrent deal with France’s Macron to return a limited number of migrants to France, each in exchange for one asylum-seeker to the U.K. who would be expected to have a family connection or a genuine reason to seek sanctuary in Britain.
Tuesday’s High Court ruling was a pause, rather than a block, on the deportation plan, after a lawyer for the migrant argued he faced a “real risk of destitution.”
But Home Office lawyers said the ruling would undermine the deterrent impact of the policy as the delay would be exploited by others fighting deportation.
Riling Reform
Starmer’s political rivals have predictably jumped on the setback for his policy.
Reform UK Head of Policy Zia Yusuf issued a press statement branding the France deal a “completely hollow and unworkable scheme.”
Chris Philp, the Conservative shadow home secretary, said: “The government’s latest Channel migrant gimmick is now in complete disarray. Two flights, a legal defeat in court and zero deportations. Not a single migrant has been removed, yet thousands more continue to arrive.”
But senior minister Liz Kendall said Wednesday she didn’t believe that a decision about one individual would prevent other removals taking place.
“I know Shabana Mahmood, our new home secretary, is absolutely determined to deliver this, to make sure that pilot works, to make sure we give a clear message that if you come here illegally, you can and you will be removed alongside the deal,” she told Times Radio.
But Rupert Yorke, Sunak’s former deputy chief of staff in No. 10 Downing Street, said the ruling will only fuel the public’s desire for “radical solutions to deliver tangible results.”
“The public won’t be interested in the legal details of why this flight was blocked. They will simply see it as further proof that successive governments have not only lost control of immigration policy, but — more fundamentally — have seen the strength of the central executive government eroded.”
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