Labour lost no time burying the Conservatives’ tawdry Rwanda plan in favour of something a little more, well, Churchillian. In July, as he welcomed European leaders to Winston’s birthplace of Blenheim Palace, Keir Starmer framed border security not as some nationalist vote-fishing expedition but rather as a pragmatic British undertaking “at the heart of the Government’s reset with Europe”.
It would also involve fighting them on the beaches. Gangs would be suitably smashed, he told his guests, by a new Border Security Command armed with “counter terrorism-style powers”. Elsewhere Starmer has also enthused over Giorgia Meloni’s ‘upstream’ fight against irregular migration — including offshoring asylum processing to Albania and outsourcing crackdowns to Tunisia.
So far, so familiar. If there’s anything European political leaders of different stripes and nationalities have united around since the 1990s, it’s more border security. But what will a counterterror-style crackdown actually achieve this time around?
