The collusion was evident between Britain’s Rishi Sunak, a Conservative who supports the expulsions of asylum seekers to Rwanda, and Giorgia Meloni, Italian prime minister and leader of the far-right Fratelli d’Italia party. Despite her promise to ” change “ As for the British, Labour’s Keir Starmer, like his predecessor, increased his displays of friendship towards his Italian counterpart during his first official visit to Rome on Monday 16 September.
Under bright sunshine, with the magnificent Villa Doria Pamphilj as a backdrop, Keir Starmer found “It’s great to be here” and praised the “remarkable progress” from Italy to limit the arrival of immigrants and fight against smuggling gangs.
It must be said that the day after a new tragedy in the English Channel – eight people lost their lives when their fragile boat sank on the night of Saturday 14 to Sunday 15 September, off the coast of Pas-de-Calais – the leader is in a hurry to give answers to the continuing arrival of asylum seekers on British soil (801 people successfully crossed the English Channel on 14 September, according to the Home Office).
A tough speech
With almost 22,000 crossings since 1Ahem In January 2024, migration is a major concern across the English Channel. The racist riots in early August demonstrated that far-right agitators were able to exploit fears and fantasies aroused by migrants to sow violence. Downing Street is also concerned by the rise of the anti-immigration party Reform UK, which managed to elect five MPs to the House of Commons in the general election in July.
Starmer has therefore adopted a tough discourse, not far from that of the Conservatives, except that he no longer promises, like Rishi Sunak, “ arrest » cross-Channel boats – was quick, on his arrival in Downing Street, to put an end to the “Rwanda deal” which planned to send asylum seekers to Kigali. This deal – initially proposed by Boris Johnson – was “a gadget”, repeated from Rome. It cost hundreds of millions of pounds without deporting any asylum seekers, and the deal was challenged in court.
However, Labour’s strategy is, for the moment, limited to a reinforced fight against traffickers with the appointment, on Monday, of a “border security commander”, Martin Hewitt, a former police chief. Since Brexit, the United Kingdom can no longer use the Dublin Regulation to return asylum seekers to other places in Europe and no longer has a mechanism to discourage crossings (this was the aim of the “Rwanda deal”). Hence London’s interest in Italian migration solutions, while the transalpine authorities welcome the latest figures from the Ministry of the Interior showing a 62% drop in the first six months of 2024 compared to the same period last year. country’s shores (33,480 people).
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