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Sticking to his criticism of former UK PM Rishi Sunak’s plans to deport incoming migrants to Rwanda, his successor Keir Starmer quashed the plan while terming it as an ineffective gimmick on July 6.
“The Rwanda scheme was dead and buried before it started. It’s never been a deterrent,” Starmer was quoted by Reuters. “I’m not prepared to continue with gimmicks that don’t act as a deterrent,” he added.
The previous Conservative government which has suffered its worst defeat since its inception, had announced the Rwanda plan in 2022. PM Sunak had expected that the move would discourage the migrants asylum seekers arriving on boats. These migrants who hail from Africa and West Asia, mostly come to the UK via France by crossing the English Channel.
Meanwhile, Sonya Sceats, CEO of Freedom from Torture, one of the the charitable organisations that campaigned to stop urge the government to drop the Rwanda plan, welcomed Starmer's announcement.
“We applaud Keir Starmer for moving immediately to close the door on this shameful scheme that played politics with the lives of people fleeting torture and persecution,” she told Reuters.
Britain spends at least three billion pounds annually on processing asylum applications, according to reports. Also, the cost of temporarily housing migrants runs at about eight million pounds a day.
The migrant crisis in the UK was not only a major election issue in the six-week election campaign but was also a crucial factor that led to Brexit — Britain’s exit from the European Union in 2016.
Last year, the UK Supreme Court had termed the policy as unlawful, adding that Rwanda would not be a safe third country. This led Conservative ministers to sign a treaty with the East African country and introduce new legislation, thus overriding the judiciary.
According to a Reuters report, the British government has already granted ‘hundreds of millions of pounds’ to establish accommodations and employ officials to make arrangements for migrants. Those funds are unlikely to be recovered.
Meanwhile, when asked about his alternative plans for solving the migrant crisis in Britain, Starmer told reporters that his government would set up a Border Security Command that would combine staff from the police, the domestic intelligence agency and prosecutors to work with international agencies and bring an end to the organised smuggling of the vulnerable migrants.