Keir Starmer isn’t interested in “gimmicks”, “talking tough” or, God forbid, protesting. He wants to roll up his sleeves and get things done – on this much he has been clear. Except, that is, for the times when it suits him to indulge in some “gesture politics”. This is especially true for asylum: Labour is headed into the snap July election promising to be tough on the “small boats crisis” and, if Starmer’s speech in Dover earlier this month is anything to go by, its plans are not good.
Gimmicks – the policies behind which could do untold damage – seem to be all Labour has. Starmer swapped Rishi Sunak’s “stop the boats” slogan for “border security”. He invoked the widely peddled myth that the UK, which has an incredibly strict asylum system, is a “soft touch” – suggesting deporting people more quickly would serve as a deterrent. And he promised a new border security command, which seems strangely similar to the small boats operational command. Granted, Labour does not look set to be quite as harsh as the Tories in every respect; Starmer committed to scrapping the Rwanda scheme. But that is the very least it could do, given how unpopular the policy is with the broader public. Look beyond the headline announcements and you find more of what we’ve had for decades – more borders, more brutality, more suffering.
Labour’s plans, Starmer has suggested, are necessary to deal with “illegal migration”. Who exactly is he referring to with this phrase? The seven-year-old girl whose death in the Channel last month he lamented in his speech but would, it seems, do little to prevent? Rasul Iran Nezhad, Shiva Mohammad Panahi and their children, Anita, nine, Armin, six, and Artin, 15 months old, who suffered the same fate in 2020? Deniz Afrasia Ahmed Mohammed? Abdulfatah Hamdallah? The list of names is long. These are the people behind the label; cruelly denigrated by our politicians, unnecessarily feared by some of the public and grossly mistreated by European border policies.
What people need, Labour refuses to give. The way to stop perilous crossings and to save lives is to provide a safe option. Safe routes of travel are the only viable solution in a world where most people must be in a country to claim asylum there. Options could include vastly increasing the number of people who arrive through resettlement schemes – where people are brought from the country to which they’ve fled to the place, in this case the UK, they want to make a life for themselves; improving family reunion routes (which allow refugees in the UK to bring relatives to join them) by opening up more pathways and removing barriers in existing ones, which refugee organisations suggest leave people with little option than to travel to the UK through unsafe routes; and establishing a visa scheme for people in Gaza to swiftly and safely come to the UK.
Yet this has been nowhere near Labour’s agenda. Instead, Starmer has committed to “smashing” the “criminal smuggling gangs” and bringing “vile people smugglers” to justice. This big, macho talk is supposedly the stuff of serious politics; it would be laughable if it wasn’t so dangerous. Labour has carefully curated a message that it will not be “soft” on asylum. That it will ditch the Rwanda scheme but forge on with tough plans. That it is different from the Tories, but not too different. One of its motivations is winning over the mostly mythical “centre ground” voter, as if the public are beyond convincing, as if that is not a politician’s job. Even now – on track to win in July – Labour doesn’t have the courage or, it seems, the desire to so much as tweak the status quo.
We’ve seen the disastrous effects of this before. Over the past 20 years, Frontex – which is responsible for policing the European Union’s borders – has had its budget increased significantly. This hasn’t stopped people from trying to reach Europe; it has only made their journeys more treacherous. Nineteen years ago, Tony Blair also stood in Dover, promising to “tighten the asylum system” and “protect our borders”. The results: more people seeking asylum were made destitute because the government stripped back state support, and there was growth in the UK’s inhumane detention estate.
The problem, then, is not what Starmer calls the “do-nothing culture”. Plenty has been done, but almost all of it has wrought misery. Security patrols, detention centres and deportations – the very mushrooming of border policy that Starmer seems to want more of – are the problems. It is these measures, paired with a dearth of government-backed safe routes to get here, that force people to take fatal risks. People are dying needlessly.
“Smugglers” exist because safe routes of travel don’t. Or to put it in language Starmer might prefer: this “trade” is only possible because there’s a “demand”. And that is because politicians won’t provide any alternatives. “Wealthy nations”, argue the academics Corey Robinson and Yvonne Su, hide behind the “evil smuggler narrative” and obscure “the role their policies play in creating the global market for smuggling in the first place”. This seems to be Labour’s plan too, and it will fail on its own terms.
Really, though, Labour knows all of this. Just look at the starting point for its policies. Rather than asking how we can ensure people receive the greatest amount of protection, the party’s proposals are instead premised on preventing asylum seekers from getting here. Even if it somehow succeeded in doing this, these people would still exist. All those other seven-year-old girls would be stranded in a country they don’t want to be, where they know almost no one. They would not disappear. They would still be somewhere, still be struggling and still wanting to be with people they love.
What we are talking about when it comes to asylum is humanity. The question to ask of our politicians is whether they will show it or not. It does not have to be this way. We should demand more from them. Campaign, protest, do whatever you can to force change – show Labour that if it wins in July, it can’t get away with this dire direction of travel. Because if it does, it will leave more people to die in the Channel and that is, quite simply, unacceptable.
Maya Goodfellow is an academic at City, University of London, and the author of Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats.
