LONDON: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Monday that a lack of coordination between UK police and intelligence agencies is partly responsible for a surge in the number of migrants reaching the UK in small boats across the English Channel.
At an international meeting on boosting border security and tackling people-smuggling, Starmer expressed frustration at the difficulty of stopping thousands of people a year risking the dangerous sea crossing from France.
“We inherited this total fragmentation between our policing, our Border Force and our intelligence agencies,” Starmer said as officials from more than 40 countries met in London. “A fragmentation that made it crystal clear, when I looked at it, that there were gaps in our defense, an open invitation at our borders for the people smugglers to crack on.”
Starmer’s center-left government, elected nine months ago, is grappling with an issue that vexed its Conservative predecessors.
Despite law-enforcement cooperation with France and work with authorities in countries further up the route taken by migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, more than 6,600 migrants crossed the channel in the first three months of this year, the highest number on record.
The opposition Conservatives say the figure shows Labour should not have scrapped the previous government’s contentious – and never-implemented – plan to send asylum-seekers who arrive by boat on one-way trips to Rwanda.
Starmer called the Rwanda plan a “gimmick” and canceled it soon after he was elected in July. Britain paid Rwanda hundreds of millions of pounds for the plan under a deal signed by the two countries in 2022, without any deportations taking place.
Monday’s meeting was addressed virtually by Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, whose far-right government has opened centers in Albania to hold some asylum-seekers while their claims are processed – a project being closely watched by Starmer’s government.
Meloni said the plan was “criticized at first,” but had “gained increasing consensus, so much so that today, European Union is proposing to set up return hubs in third countries.”
The governments of Albania, Vietnam and Iraq, whose nationals account for a significant number of asylum-seekers in the UK, were also represented.
Starmer, who has said organized people-smugglers should be treated in the same way as terror gangs, has been criticized by refugee groups, and some Labour supporters, for his hard-line approach to irregular migration.
But he said “there’s nothing progressive or compassionate about turning a blind eye to this. Nothing progressive or compassionate about continuing that false hope which attracts people to make those journeys.
“This vile trade exploits the cracks between our institutions, pits nations against one another and profits from our inability at the political level to come together,” Starmer said.
“We’ve got to combine our resources, share intelligence and tactics, and tackle the problem upstream at every step of the people smuggling routes.”