Starmer is looking to Meloni to solve his migration woes - and the Left can’t stand it
Backbench Labour MPs may well look back on the summer of 2024, when they spent their entire time replying to angry constituents about the scrapping of some pensioners’ heating allowance, as halcyon days.
For now they face the prospect, over the next few years, of replying to even angrier emails asking them why they have adopted an immigration plan that involves shipping thousands of asylum seekers “offshore” for processing.
One paper has described Italy’s Albanian deal – Italy paying for immigration centres in that country so that those waiting for their claims to be decided in Italy can be sent to Albania instead – as “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Rwanda”.
But it’s Italy’s experience that Keir Starmer seems keen to learn from and – who knows? – perhaps emulate here in blighty.
His bilateral meeting today with Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni was always going to raise eyebrows here in Britain. The controversial politician now leading Italy was once decried as “far-Right” (isn’t everyone nowadays?). But since assuming office she seems to have mellowed as the reality of government has hit home and served to dampen her formerly populist rhetoric.
Still, Starmer’s advisers will be aware that today’s summit will risk opening up a new avenue of criticism from his critics, as if the heating allowance debacle, the cronyism row and, more recently, the vaguely Wodehousian scandal of clothes for access, was not already enough to be getting on with. He could hardly have endeared himself less with his party loyalists if he had sought out a selfie with Benjamin Netanyahu. Or Donald Trump.
Meloni isn’t exactly the kind of political leader with which members of polite Left-wing society associate. And yet here was Keir Starmer, not only sharing a platform with her but saying positive things about an immigration scheme that a few years ago would have had your average Labour activist sobbing in the aisles of national conference.
To Labour spinners insisting that Italy’s deal with Albania is nothing like the Conservatives’ Rwanda scheme that Starmer personally scrapped on winning office, I would say: nonsense. In most of the vital aspects of the Albania deal, there exists all the same reasons that Left-wing opinion so vehemently opposed Rwanda.
It is true that the Rwanda scheme offered asylum applicants a one-way ticket to the African state where, if their applications for refugee status proved successful, they would be welcome to remain. Whereas, the Albania scheme offers applicants the chance, should their applications succeed, of returning to live and work in Italy.
This was not the crucial barrier that prevented the Rwanda scheme from winning the hearts and minds of Labour-leaning supporters. What most offended affluent, liberal, progressive opinion was the very notion of sending asylum applicants who had arrived on the south coast in dinghies off in a plane somewhere rather than processing them here. Consider the occasions when, in the past, former convicts, some of whom committed the most heinous crimes, were deported to their homelands only for Labour MPs and peers to sign open letters demanding that they be allowed to stay, in order that the rest of us may benefit from their continued presence.
It was not the one-way nature of Rwanda to which they objected; it was their initial removal from our shores.
But if Starmer is going to follow in Meloni’s footsteps, he needs to do so very quickly indeed. The immigration crisis grows more urgent every day that another rubber dinghy washes up on the south coast, and every time another innocent life is needlessly lost.
But the political problem he will have to contend with, assuming he adopts a similar scheme to Italy’s, is to explain why he scrapped the Rwanda solution in the first place. Claims that it proved to be no deterrent to would-be arrivals simply don’t stand up, since the scheme hadn’t got underway by the time it was scrapped. Constant reminders of the huge amounts of money that the Conservatives spent on Rwanda will count for naught if a version of the Albanian scheme is pursued, for such a scheme will not come cheap.
It is hardly surprising that Starmer wants some fresh answers to the immigration crisis. It will be surprising if he is forgiven by his party for taking a policy lead on such a sensitive topic from Georgia Meloni.