The claim that Labour is planning to join the EU’s refugee quota scheme is “complete nonsense,” party leader Sir Keir Starmer said on Sunday.
Speaking to Sky News’s “Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips” programme, the Labour leader said he wasn’t talking about joining the scheme, and accused ministers of “pumping out complete garbage this week in terms of the numbers that they are suggesting.”
“There is obviously an EU quota system for EU members. Well, it’s obvious we are not an EU member. We will not be part of that. We are not an EU member. This is why what the government’s saying, it’s been complete garbage,” he said.
“And even that scheme within the EU is not working. I’ve been discussing that with EU leaders up here. That scheme itself isn’t really working very well. So the idea that we’re going to join the EU scheme on quotas is complete nonsense. We’re not an EU member and that wasn’t what I was talking about,” he added.
Sir Keir made the remarks after he was asked about the comment of an EU diplomat, who told The Times of London earlier this week that the Labour leader is “deluded” to think the bloc can “come to his rescue” when its member states are “under much more pressure on asylum and migration than Britain.”
The opposition leader said “you don’t need a returns agreement to return people to their country of origin” and that Labour will also seek to strike returns deals with third countries, saying he won’t pretend they are not helpful.
But he dismissed the government’s measures such as the Rwanda plan as “gimmicks,” saying “The only person [who] has gone to Rwanda is the Home Secretary.”
Setting out Labour’s plan to tackle illegal immigration earlier this week, Sir Keir said he wants to change the law so serious crime prevention orders, which are currently used to target terror suspects, can be used against people-traffickers, which, like terrorist operations, are often cross-border.
Pressed on whether his plan includes detaining people smugglers without charge for 28 days as terror suspects can be, Sir Keir said it’s not about the detention powers, but rather the power to freeze assets and restrict movements.
Sir Keir was in Canada on Saturday for a summit of left-leading political leaders including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, and former prime ministers including the UK’s Tony Blair, New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, Finland’s Sanna Marin, and Sweden’s Magdalena Andersson.
Speaking ahead of the summit, the opposition leader accused the government of losing control of the borders.
Calling the summit a meeting of “progressive” leaders, Sir Keir said at an event alongside Mr. Støre, “In principle, it’s wrong to think that control of the border is not a progressive issue.
“Because if you lose control of the border, a number of things happen—that’s when in certain places you get into the business of people talking about walls and fences because you’ve lost control of the border,” he said.
“It goes down this slippery slope. And if you can’t have a wall and a fence, you have some of the gimmicks that we’re seeing in the United Kingdom,” he added.
Labour has insisted the party will do better than the Conservatives in smashing the people trafficking gangs and speeding up the processing of asylum claims.
Sir Keir is expected to visit Paris next week to meet French President Emmanuel Macron.
Asked earlier about whether a Labour government will take a share of Europe’s migrants as part of a quid pro quo deal, Sir Keir’s spokesman didn’t rule out the possibility.
“The exact way it would operate would have to be for negotiation. The UK will always want to be a country that takes people through safe and legal routes as we have done most recently when it comes to Afghanistan and Ukraine, for example.”
