Good morning. Keir Starmer recorded about 10 broadcast interviews yesterday afternoon, after his conference speech, on the basis that they would all be broadcast this morning. They are playing out now. As you would expect, they are very repetitive – a lot of the questions and the answers are the same – but there are still plenty of new lines in them.
One of his most audacious answers came when he was speaking to Christopher Hope, political editor of GB News, Reform UK’s favourite TV channel. Hope asked if the government would stop the small boats, and Starmer said that the returns agreement that he negotiated with France would make a difference. But then he went on to claim that they were “Farage boats, in many senses” because after Brexit the Dublin convention returns agreement that used to be in place no longer applied.
Here is Starmer’s answer in full.
The returns agreement with France is important because we need to establish that if you come by boat, you will be returned to France.
I accept the numbers [returned so far under the agreement] are low. We had to prove the concept and prove that it could work. We’ve now done that. But now we need to ramp that up.
I would gently point out to Nigel Farage and others that before we left the EU, we had a returns agreement with every country in the EU. And he told the country it will make no difference if we left. Well, he was wrong about that. These are Farage boats, in many senses, that are coming across the channel.
Starmer does not seem to have used this line in other interviews and it is not clear yet whether this is the start of a sustained government attempt to rebrand these as “Farage boats”, or whether Starmer was just trying to wind up Hope, who often asks questions that reflect the views of his Farage-loving viewers.
Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, made a similar argument in his party conference speech. John Rentoul, the Independent commentator who is broadly sympathetic to Labour, said this morning Davey and Starmer were both wrong to argue that being out of the Dublin convention made much difference to small boat arrival numbers.
Surprised by PM repeating Ed Davey’s bogus analysis: boats are nothing to do with Brexit; & the Dublin convention never worked
But in fact the Dublin convention probably isn’t the key issue. Peter Walsh, a senior researcher at the Migration Observatory, a migration thinktank, argued recently that Brexit is making the small boat problem worse because the UK no longer has access to an EU fingerprint database, and that means asylum seekers can come to the UK knowing they won’t automatically be thrown out because they have applied in another European country. He said:
There’s also increasing evidence of a Brexit effect [in explaining why migrants want to leave France and come to the UK]. We speak with asylum seekers now, and often they’ve claimed asylum in the EU country, sometimes been refused, but they understand that because the UK is no longer a part of the EU, and no longer party to the EU’s fingerprint database for asylum seekers, if they can get to the UK, they have another bite of the cherry and another chance to secure asylum status and remain in Europe.
There are plenty more lines in the Starmer interviews. I will post them shortly.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9.30am: The conference starts, and the main speakers are Emma Reynolds, the environment secretary, at 10.30am, Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, at 10.40am, Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary who is winding up the conference as incoming chair of Labour’s national executive committee, at 11.15am.
11.30am: Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, and Lucy Powell, the former Commons leader, take part in a deputy leadership hustings.
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