The complicity was evident between Britain’s Rishi Sunak, a conservative who defends the deportations of asylum seekers to Rwanda, and Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister and leader of the far-right Fratelli d’Italia party. Despite her promise to ” change “ In the British, Labour Party leader Keir Starmer, like his predecessor, has multiplied demonstrations of friendship towards his Italian counterpart during his first official visit to Rome on Monday 16 September.
Under a radiant sun, with the superb Villa Doria Pamphilj as a backdrop, Keir Starmer found “fantastic to be here” and praised the “remarkable progress” Italy to limit migrant arrivals and combat people-smuggling gangs.
It must be said that the day after a new tragedy in the Channel – eight people lost their lives in the sinking of their fragile boat, on the night of Saturday 14 to Sunday 15 September, off the coast of Pas-de-Calais – the leader is in a hurry to provide answers to the continuing arrival of asylum seekers on British soil (801 people successfully crossed the Channel on 14 September, according to the Home Office).
A harsh speech
With almost 22,000 successful crossings since 1er January 2024, migration is a major concern across the Channel. The racist riots in early August showed that far-right agitators are able to exploit fears and fantasies about migrants to sow violence. Downing Street is also concerned about the rise of the anti-migrant party, Reform UK, which managed to elect five MPs to the House of Commons in the general election in July.
Mr Starmer has therefore adopted a tough discourse, not so far from that of the Conservatives, except that he no longer promises, like Rishi Sunak, to “ stop “boats crossing the Channel – he rushed, upon his arrival in Downing Street, to end the “Rwanda deal” which planned to send asylum seekers to Kigali. This deal was “a gadget”, he repeated from Rome – initially proposed by Boris Johnson, it cost hundreds of millions of pounds without any asylum seekers being able to be deported, the agreement having been challenged in court.
However, the Labour strategy is limited, for the moment, to a reinforced fight against people smugglers with the appointment, on Monday, of a “border security commander”, Martin Hewitt, a former police chief. Since Brexit, the United Kingdom can no longer rely on the Dublin regulation to send asylum seekers elsewhere in Europe and it no longer has a mechanism to discourage crossings (this was the aim of the “Rwanda agreement”). 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 number of arrivals on the country's shores (33,480 people) over the first six months of 2024 compared to the same period last year.
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Source: Lemonde
