PM brands Channel crossings ‘Farage boats’ because Brexit has hampered returns – UK politics live
PM brands Channel crossings ‘Farage boats’ because Brexit has hampered returns – UK politics live
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.
