‘These are Farage boats […] that are coming across the channel’
Keir Starmer has attacked Nigel Farage on the issue that will hurt him most – his signature policy: Brexit.
Brexit, which Farage campaigned for since the 1990s, has severely damaged the economy, trade and even hit public health through higher drug import costs.
In an interview with GB News at Labour Party conference in Liverpool last night, Starmer called the dinghy boats crossing the channel which the Reform leader complains so much about ‘Farage boats’.
Starmer said: “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. He told the country it would make no difference if we left,” the prime minister said.
“Well, he was wrong about that — these are Farage boats, in many senses, that are coming across the Channel.”
A Reform official has said the claims “won’t wash with the British public” and accused Starmer of failing “abysmally” in his pledge to “smash the gangs”.
While the UK was part of the EU, asylum seekers arriving in small boats could be returned to the first safe country in the EU that they passed through under the Dublin Regulation.
Since Brexit, the Dublin Regulation no longer applies, meaning asylum seekers cannot be returned to other European countries in the same way.
Lib Dem leader Ed Davey made a similar argument in his speech at Lib Dem party conference last week.
But not everyone agrees: commentator John Rentoul has dismissed the argument as “bogus” insisting the Dublin Convention “never worked”.
A senior researcher at migration think tank, the Migration Observatory, Peter Walsh, argued recently on the Today programme that Brexit has worsened the small boat issue because the UK no longer has access to an EU fingerprint database.
Without it, asylum seekers know they cannot automatically be returned after applying for asylum in another European country.
Since Brexit, the number of small boat crossings to the UK has risen sharply.
Just 299 people crossed the Channel in small boats in 2018. That rose to 8,466 in 2020, 28,526 in 2021, and 45,755 in 2022. So far this year, more than 33,500 have made the journey.
As Starmer and Davey are rightly pointing out, Farage is trying to win power by complaining about the consequences of an issue he has made his political career out of campaigning for.
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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