ANAS Sarwar has said Keir Starmer is being “grown-up” in deciding to hold talks with Italy’s hard-right government on migration.
The UK Government will seek to understand how Italy has effected “dramatic reductions” in the number of people coming into the country via the Mediterranean Sea, the Prime Minister said on a trip to Rome.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s approach to border control has witnessed a 60% drop in arrivals by sea over the past year, and includes a processing deal with Albania which has been compared to the Rwanda scheme.
Starmer’s visit to Italy comes as part of a bid to reset relations with the UK’s European neighbours.
Scottish Labour leader Sarwar was asked about how comfortable he was with Starmer holding talks with Meloni, particularly as Labour MP Kim Johnson said it was “disturbing” the Prime Minister was “seeking to learn lessons from a neo-fascist government”.
But Sarwar did not suggest he was uneasy about the idea and instead said Starmer was taking a “grown-up approach” to resetting relations with EU neighbours.
He also did not accept the a processing arrangement in Albania was the same as the Rwanda scheme.
Asked if he was comfortable with Starmer learning lessons from Meloni, he told reporters: “We said we would reset the relationship with the EU and key European allies. We did that with Germany, it’s also important to do it with other nations including Italy.
“We’re willing to look at lessons from other countries while maintaining our own national security, maintaining our own immigration system, our own border security, while resetting that relationship with European allies.”
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper had earlier insisted the Italy-Albania deal was not the same as the Rwanda plan Labour scrapped when it came to power.
Pressed on Johnson’s criticism of Starmer’s visit, Sarwar went on: “We are either serious about resetting our relationship with European Union and key allies in the EU or we’re not.
“Of course there are going to be deep political disagreements with other countries around the world, both in terms of their own direction of travel or the political ideologies of which those political leaderships may come from.
“That challenge could present itself, for example, in a future US presidential election, that doesn’t mean we don’t want to keep the allyship and the friendship with our near neighbours in the European Union or indeed the transatlantic relationship, that’s why we’re taking a grown up approach to reset the relationship with the European Union.”
Starmer announced he was axing the previous Tory administration’s Rwanda deportation policy as one of his first moves in office, and declared ahead of his visit to Italy there would be “no more gimmicks” to curb migration.
He and Cooper recently held a summit to tackle the gangs facilitating English Channel small boat crossings, as they refocus migration policy on organised crime.
