1 April 2025

Is Keir Starmer falling into the Rwanda trap?

“Stop the boats” helped destroy Rishi Sunak – and now Labour risks repeating his mistake.

In January 2023, less than three months after entering No 10, Rishi Sunak announced his priorities. The then prime minister made five promises on which the electorate should judge him. Three related to the economy, and the fourth – reducing NHS waiting lists – concerned the area of state failure voters were most likely to notice in their day-to-day lives.

The fifth was different. It focused on something beyond the everyday experience of the majority of voters. Recognising how the issue of illegal immigration was being seized upon in right-wing circles (most notably by Nigel Farage who first catapulted it onto the national agenda with a video from a Kent beach in 2020), Sunak promised to “pass new laws to stop small boats, making sure that if you come to this country illegally, you are detained and swiftly removed”. Within the speech, this promise got truncated into the catchier “stop the boats”.

Sunak might not have realised it at the time, but he had in one three-word slogan created an albatross that would hang around the neck of his government, reducing it – like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner – to a single symbolic failure.

Sunak’s remaining 18 months in office were defined and frequently derailed by that pledge. The Conservative government did pass new legislation to toughen up deportations in the form of the Rwanda Bill, which became both a test of Sunak’s waning authority and a lightning rod for criticisms that the Tories were disregarding domestic as well as international law. But most of all, it galvanised Farage and his supporters, who could point every day to the ways in which the government was falling short of its promise to “stop the boats”.

Why bring up Rwanda now? Because Keir Starmer risks falling into the same trap.

Illegal immigration is the hot topic this week. Where Sunak had “stop the boats”, Starmer has his own catchphrase: “smash the gangs”.

On Monday, the Prime Minister hosted the first ever Organised Immigration Crime Summit, where representatives from more than 40 countries, plus tech giants like Meta and TikTok, met to discuss multilateral ways to tackle the problem. Starmer reiterated that the issue should be treated like terrorism, while the Home Office has announced £30m to disrupt people-trafficking networks and an extra £3m to boost prosecutions.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has said she is talking to Italy about its plan to process asylum applications in third countries such as Albania (indeed, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni sent a video message to the summit championing the scheme). Cooper also said the government is looking at how European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) applies in deportation cases.

All of this is very different from Sunak’s Rwanda plan – which Starmer derided as costing over £700m of taxpayer money to remove just four volunteers, compared to the 24,000 people who Starmer claims have been deported since the election. Even the suggestion of “return hubs” and “offshore processing” is different, regardless of Conservative attempts to blur what is both a legal and a moral distinction. Notably, the Rwanda scheme would have applied to anyone coming to the UK via irregular routes, whether they were found to have a valid asylum claim or not. The proposals under consideration now, however, refer either to processing in third countries or to returning claimants whose applications have failed.

Starmer flagged the differences in an op-ed for the Daily Mail, where he described Rwanda as “a gimmick” and “a hollow pledge to working people which had no prospect of ever being fulfilled”.

Also notable, though, was the op-ed’s opening line: “I know many of you are angry about illegal migration. You’re right to be.” Starmer launched the summit with the same sentiment: “It makes me angry, frankly, because it’s unfair on ordinary working people who pay the price.”

Illegal immigration is indeed something voters are angry about. According to YouGov, it was the fourth-highest priority at the time of the election. It remains one of the most salient issues today, especially for those who identify as Conservatives or Leave voters (YouGov sadly doesn’t have a breakdown for Reform voters for this question). The cost of hotels while claims are being processed and the footage of arrivals make this issue a particularly emotive one.

Still, given that the public over-estimate the proportion of illegal versus legal immigrants, it’s worth considering whether at least some of this anger is because of the amount of attention the issue gets, which is in part due to mainstream politicians trying to mitigate the risk posed by Reform. That is not to say the anger is concocted, nor that the challenge is not real. (It is clearly unsustainable for the Home Office to be spending up to £8m per day housing asylum applicants in hotels.) But it is also true that Sunak’s promise to “stop the boats” gave the public – and Farage – ammunition to point out just how badly he was failing. Is Starmer making the same mistake by inviting the nation’s anger?

This is a problem that cannot be solved by the UK alone. It requires international cooperation, intelligence sharing, investment in processing, a workable returns policy and, crucially, the implementation of safe and legal routes so genuine asylum seekers are not forced to put their fate in the hands of trafficking gangs and make dangerous journeys. Starmer knows this, and the policies announced yesterday demonstrate a change in attitude and strategy that is more likely to yield results than just desperately repeating “Rwanda”.

But it is no guarantee. And there is a risk that fanfare around this week’s summit and the promise to “smash the gangs” becomes, like “stop the boats”, an attention-grabbing metric by which to measure just how badly the government has failed on its own terms.

This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here