Like Blair, Starmer's immigration policy is a recipe for disaster...we need action

SIR Keir Starmer has promised to “significantly” reduce net migration to Britain — despite refusing to set a cap on numbers coming here.

- By Michael Knowles Home Affairs Editor

The Prime Minister, speaking as 600 asylum seekers crossed the Channel yesterday, warned that the UK is at risk of becoming an “island of strangers” because integration has failed.

Unveiling his White Paper on immigration, he pledged to ramp up deportations by increasing the number of eligible offenders, including shoplifters and sex offenders, and to overhaul how Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is used.

The social care visa route will be scrapped amid fears it is being abused as a back-door route into Britain. And migrants will have to wait 10 years rather than five to apply for indefinite leave to remain, he said. However, those who significantly contribute to society, such as nurses, doctors and engineers, could be fast-tracked.

Foreign workers will also be required to take graduate-level jobs and have good English language skills. The Home Office claims the changes will lead to 100,000 fewer people coming to the UK each year, meaning net migration could settle at around 250,000 by the end of this Parliament in 2029.

But former Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick called the plans “a white flag for yet more mass migration, legal and illegal, for the boats to keep coming”.

Disaster

He added: “It’s another shameful betrayal of voters. Labour's big plan on illegal immigration is to ‘clarify’ the law on Article 8 of the ECHR, commonly used to avoid deportation. But this does nothing to stop people using other routes, like Article 3. If Labour were serious they would disapply the Human Rights Act altogether.