British Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited one of his Conservative predecessor’s few remaining allies, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, in Rome on Monday. The Labour Party presented the trip as a “pragmatic” attempt to figure out what to do about irregular immigration.
Meloni is set to implement a deal signed in 2023 with Albania to process asylum claims for tens of thousands of people rescued at sea in that country across the Adriatic. Starmer said he was “interested” in the plan, which has been questioned by the UN and human rights groups, and in what Italy is doing to prevent the arrival of people who have not previously processed their papers.
“In a sense, today is the return of British pragmatism. We are pragmatists first and foremost. When we see a challenge, we talk to our friends and allies about the different approaches they are taking, looking at how they are working, and that is what we are doing today,” Starmer said at a news conference with Meloni.
The prime minister stressed the importance of international cooperation, even if the main negotiations in this regard are taking place between the members of the European Union and the controversial agreements that the EU is signing with third countries such as Libya, Turkey and Tunisia. “No country will be able to manage these trafficking networks alone,” Meloni said. The prime minister promised to contribute more than four million euros to a fund promoted by Meloni and other European leaders to invest in the countries of origin of migrants and thus, supposedly, address the causes of their population’s departure.
Human Rights Watch, among other human rights groups, has accused Italy of playing with the human rights of migrants and questioned the deal with Albania, which could lead to abuses such as those reported in the EU’s relations with Libya. Not taking refugees to the nearest Italian port “violates the human rights to rescue at sea and undermines the right to asylum and the right to arbitrary detention,” the group said. The European Commission said it would “monitor” the deal, and the UN refugee agency predicted it would cause “more suffering” like other such deals.
Ahead of the trip, Amnesty International and the British Refugee Council criticised Starmer for approaching Meloni. A Labour MP, Kim Johnson from Liverpool, told the Tutor that he did not understand why a Labour government “was trying to learn lessons from a neo-fascist government”. “Have we learned nothing from the failures of the conservatives“Increased security and draconian deportation measures are not deterring desperate people from seeking asylum, and they are at risk of serious human rights violations,” Johnson said.
End of the agreement with Rwanda
Starmer, a Labour MP and lawyer specialising in European humanitarian law, reversed the previous Conservative government’s policy of trying to send anyone crossing the Channel without papers to Rwanda upon his election in July.
Unlike his predecessor, Starmer has insisted he will respect international law and never remove the UK from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights that enforces it, as the Conservatives have suggested. But Starmer has also pledged to reduce cross-Channel boat arrivals and “net migration”, the difference between people leaving the UK and those arriving.
The rejection of immigration and foreigners in general, one of the drivers of Brexit, has focused political debate in the United Kingdom over the last decade, even though the number of undocumented migrant arrivals is lower than in other large countries, such as Spain and Italy.
Between June 2023 and June this year, the UK detected the irregular arrival of almost 39,000 people, most of them in small boats in the channel, according to data published by the Home Office. This represents, in fact, a decrease of 26% compared to the previous year. Arrivals by boat are the most visible and the easiest to identify, as the government explained in June, then in the hands of Sunak.
For comparison, in 2023, almost 59,000 people arrived in Spain, 20 million fewer than the United Kingdom. In Italy, around 158,000 people arrived in these circumstances, according to the Interior Ministry.
