IT has taken a long time for Sir Keir Starmer and his colleagues to realise the full horror of the Government’s Rwanda scheme, but they have finally twigged.
Yes, they are beginning to realise that it might actually work.
For months, Labour assumed that the new law to deport illegal migrants to Rwanda, so that they make their asylum claims there, was going to turn into an expensive fiasco.
Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper claimed it would cost £169,000 for every asylum seeker deported, and would take 100 years to deport 15,000 of them — as many as have arrived in small boats in the past six months alone.
But she forgot that the whole purpose of the Rwanda scheme is not necessarily to deport large numbers of asylum seekers, but rather to act as a deterrent.
If people can be dissuaded from coming to Britain illegally because they know they will not be allowed to settle here, it will have done its job.
The number of people arriving on small boats from across the Channel fell by a third last year, from 45,774 in 2022 to 29,437 in 2023.
But a firmer sign that the Rwanda plan may be working comes from Dublin, where the Irish government has pleaded with Rishi Sunak to take back asylum seekers who are crossing the border from Northern Ireland.
As one asylum seeker told reporters, he is making his claim in Ireland rather than Britain because he feared being sent to Rwanda.
Ireland’s deputy prime minister, Micheal Martin, also says this is the reason behind a sudden influx of asylum seekers to his country.
No wonder that Starmer seems suddenly to have gone quiet on Rwanda.
The Labour leader didn’t even raise it during Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday in spite of it being very much in the news over the past week.
Don’t be surprised if, come the general election, Labour not only stops trying to condemn the Rwanda scheme but quietly adopts the policy itself.
Starmer keeps promising he is going to stop the boats but there is scant sign he has any policy that is remotely likely to achieve that.
Labour has three main proposals on migration.
Firstly, it wants to negotiate a return deal with France, so that anyone who arrives in Britain illegally after having crossed the Channel could be sent back there.
Secondly, it wants to speed up the deportation of failed asylum seekers.
Thirdly, it proposes better ways to integrate asylum seekers into British society.
The French will be laughing at the first.
Britain already pays France £63million a year supposedly to stop migrants leaving French shores.
France has made some effort with patrols, in a half-hearted way, but has never shown the least intention of taking back migrants.
On the contrary, the week before last, one of its patrol ships escorted a boat into UK waters even after some of the migrants aboard had drowned off a French beach.
As for the second, Starmer, as a human rights lawyer, must know that his former colleagues will do all they can to delay and frustrate the repatriation of failed asylum seekers.
And, regarding the third, it is no deterrent whatsoever.
The only way Labour is going to stop the boats under its existing policies would be if it granted a free Eurostar ticket to any migrant who wants to come.
Of course, however successful the Rwanda scheme is in deterring migrants, there will always be those who denounce it as an evil and callous policy.
But that is very far from the truth.
As Home Secretary James Cleverly said this week, deterring people traffickers from putting people to sea in lethally unseaworthy boats is a very humanitarian thing to do.
Britain is not washing its hands of the moral duty to help those who are genuinely fleeing from danger.
We are simply offering them sanctuary in another safe country.
There is more than a whiff of racism in those who claim that Rwanda can’t possibly be trusted to respect the rights of those who reside there.
The object of UK policy on asylum seekers should be to help the greatest number of people we can.
We have been doing this by pouring money, personnel and resources into refugee camps in countries around the periphery of Syria, for example.
Indeed, Britain is one of the world’s leaders in helping Syrian refugees.
As for the migrants who make it as far as Dover, some of them might have started out as genuine refugees, but a very large contingent of them are economic migrants.
You can tell that from the fact that around seven in ten of them are young men.
Genuine flows of refugees are made up of men and women of all ages, plus children.
No developed country can accept uncontrolled migration, because there are simply too many people in the developing world who could theoretically benefit from moving to Britain.
The role of the Rwanda scheme is to deter the trafficking of economic migrants to Britain so that we can better concentrate resources on those who are genuinely in need.
Those are aims which Labour should have no trouble supporting.
