Analysis
Starmer joins Meloni in the war against migrants
Starmer and Meloni, a part of the center-left and the hard right, share the same interpretation of migration. Starmer has paid. Since the end of August, negative opinion of the Starmer government rose by about 20 points.
“I'm utterly focused on what I think is the most likely deterrent and effective way of dealing with unlawful migration, and that is to take down the gangs that are running this vile trade,” British PM Keir Starmer said at a joint conference with his Italian counterpart Giorgia Meloni on Monday.
“Of course it's a problem when we've got people arriving into the UK who are arriving unlawfully ... Rather than a gimmick which, as you know, cost £700 million to persuade four volunteers to go to Rwanda, we have gone down the road of pragmatism. Already we have returned over 3,000 people by flights, so the flights did actually get off under this government, not to Rwanda but back to countries of origin carrying people who shouldn’t be here.”
His words paint a clear picture: he and Meloni don’t just share an affinity on some particular topics, but a profound view of the world. At least on migration policies, that is, because they still have major differences on Ukraine, the other major bilateral issue.
Starmer and Meloni, i.e., Labour and Fratelli d'Italia, a part of the center-left and the hard right, share the same interpretation of migration: a phenomenon that depends substantially on criminal organizations. She quoted Falcone and Borsellino’s dictum “follow the money”; he stressed his experience as director of the UK attorney general's office engaged in fighting jihadist organizations. The Mafia and terrorism: this is what the two leaders are thinking about when they’re discussing migrants.
As they start from similar premises, they arrive at similar solutions: intensify the fight against traffickers; increase judicial, police and intelligence collaboration; make more effective use of Interpol and Europol by creating specific divisions for border control, as the FdI leader proposed. As Starmer pointed out, the drop in landings in Italy – 60% less compared to 2023 – give the impression that the Italian recipes are working. The specter of the Albania plan was constantly in the background of their press conference. When Starmer, criticized at home by other Labour figures and a number of NGOs, was asked if he was thinking about relocating asylum seekers, his answer was a deflection. So the real answer is probably “yes.” At the press conference, Meloni seemed to explicitly confirm it: “The UK Government has shown great interest” in the Rome-Tirana agreement.
For the Italian Prime Minister, it is of crucial importance to cash in on the support from the UK. The recent rulings of the courts in Palermo and Catania on the rules for the detention of asylum seekers have been sobering for her Albania plan. If the same trend continues in courts across the Adriatic, her government intends to blame the judiciary for the halt to the policy, with the backing of its international partners: the 15 EU countries that have asked the Commission to outsource dealing with migrants, which are now joined by the United Kingdom. The latter’s support is worth even more on balance, since it comes from the other side of the political aisle. And indeed, half of the Italian government is celebrating the press conference, pointing out that Starmer was taking cues from Meloni, while the opposition is in disarray – especially the part that had pointed to Labour's “victory in the center” as a roadmap for the Italian left.
It was a doubtful proposition, given that after two and a half months, the British premier's public support has already fallen off a cliff: according to the latest YouGov survey, from the end of August, the percentage of adults with a negative opinion of the Starmer government rose by about 20 points, jumping to 51 percent, while that of those in favor fell from 29 percent to 23 percent.
The austerity-as-usual policies that Starmer has turned to certainly weigh on this result: both those already implemented, such as the two-child cap for families receiving benefits and the recent abolition of the heating bonus that helped ten million seniors, and those to come. “We are going to have to be unpopular,” said Starmer, who traces all the problems to the legacy of the Tories, keeping quiet about the responsibility shared by his Labor predecessors, Blair and Brown. Since he arrived at 10 Downing Street, the most left-wing thing he has done is remove Thatcher's grim portrait from the wall.
Migrant policy is no exception, as Monday’s press conference with Meloni showed. Interior Minister Yvette Cooper, who has said she was interested in the Albania migrant centers, has just announced the appointment of a former police chief, Martin Hewitt, to the top of the Border Security agency. The goal is to undercut the right-wingers and promise efficiency, while there have already been 46 deaths in the Channel in 2024. After all, anti-migration policies are increasingly taken up by parties across the political spectrum convergence, from the far right to the center-left, as the approval of the Migration and Asylum Pact at the end of von der Leyen's first term showed at the EU level. The German border controls imposed by the Social Democrat Scholz also went into effect on Monday.
There is still a significant distance between Starmer and Meloni on Ukraine. In recent days, senior members of the Italian government, from Tajani to Crosetto, had made it clear that Italy disagrees with giving Ukraine the green light to use Western-made long-range missiles on Russian territory. In the UK, the Labor government is in favor of approval for the long-range strikes, while both Biden and Scholz remain against. Still at issue are the Storm Shadow missiles, used by the British Army but built by Leonardo, among others.
According to peacelink.it, the war industry linked to the Italian Ministry of Defense in fact developed the “navigation and targeting system” for these weapons. That is exactly the system that would require the active support of NATO or its member countries through their satellites. Putin has said that he would view such assistance as direct military involvement and has threatened further escalation. After the customary phrases of support for Ukraine, Meloni signaled she was against the idea of approving long-range missile strikes on Russian territory: “These are decisions which are made by single countries which provide these weapons, bearing in mind their constitution and their legal framework. In Italy this authorization, as you know today, as of yet, is not debatable, but these are all decisions which we fully share with our allies.”
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/starmer-abbraccia-meloni-nella-guerra-ai-migranti on 2024-09-17