Starmer’s Border Betrayal
Labour is pouring petrol on a tinderbox
Matt Goodwin’s newsletter goes to 81,000 subscribers from 181 countries. Like our stuff? Then for the equivalent of buying us a pint become a paying supporter. Help us while gaining access to exclusive posts, the archive, events, discounts, comments and know you’re supporting independent writers making a difference. Join us on YouTube, Insta, TikTok, X and Facebook.
Keir Starmer and the Labour government are playing with fire.
That’s what I thought as I watched Starmer, this week, unveil his latest “plan” for stopping the small boats and fixing Britain’s spiralling border crisis.
Standing alongside Emmanuel Macron, President of France, Starmer introduced something that will only further erode public trust and fuel public anger.
Britain, in case you haven’t noticed, is a tinderbox right now. You can literally feel it. As I said on television this week, thanks to years and years of being lied to and gaslit by politicians in Westminster, the British people are today a lot angrier, a lot more frustrated, and a lot more disillusioned than the ruling class think.
We got a sense of it in just how quickly some people took to the streets after the Southport atrocity. You can see it, too, in how people are still taking to the streets in Northern Ireland. And you can see it in a surge of public support for Reform and what this really represents —a total rejection of the establishment.
Which is why I’ve long argued that it is absolutely essential the government and the British state get their arms around this border crisis and solve it, quickly, before things get completely out-of-control.
But what has the hapless Keir Starmer done this week? He’s decided to pour yet more gasoline over this tinderbox, making the country even more unstable.
The very same man who spent years deriding Rishi Sunak’s efforts to fix the small boat crisis through the Rwanda plan as a “gimmick” has just delivered to the British people the ultimate gimmick —another trick, another sticking plaster, another reshuffling of the chairs on the deck of the Titanic.
This isn’t a serious plan for fixing our borders and restoring public trust. It is an exchange programme for illegal migrants. It is an insult to the British people.
The idea is that for every one illegal migrant who enters Britain on a small boat and is returned to France, Britain will take a legitimate asylum-seeker from France.
This, Starmer and Macron say, with a straight face, will smash the business model of the people smuggling gangs, making it clear if you arrive in Britain illegally you will be sent back to France while only “legitimate” asylum-seekers who have had their case processed will be allowed to carry on to Britain.
I’m sorry but let me state what is immediately obvious to anybody who knows anything about border security.
This is nonsense.
For a start, it makes a total mockery of the social contract in this country.
Like me, the British people do not want “one in, one out”.
They want “none in, all out”.
What Keir Starmer and his equally hapless Home Secretary Yvette Cooper are trying to push us into is a world in which the large-scale transfer of asylum-seekers and illegal migrants into our country is considered somehow normal and acceptable.
Sorry, but no.
No. No. No.
I do not want to live in that kind of country and nor, I think, do the vast majority of British people.
Britain has already done its fair share, taking hundreds of thousands of refugees from Hong Kong, Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Eritrea, to name only a few.
Not to mention taking millions of legal migrants and all while grappling with the worst cost-of-living crisis since the Second World War, the highest tax burden in this country since the late 1940s, and an economy that is still as flat as a pancake.
Which is why most people in this country want a complete end to mass migration —not the introduction of an exchange scheme for illegal migrants.
Britain, remember, is already hosting an estimated 1.2 million illegal migrants, with 1 in every 13 people in London thought to be here illegally.
I don’t know about you but I want all those law-breakers out of the country before even considering a new scheme.
And the details behind Labour’s gimmick make zero sense.
While Yvette Cooper stuttered and struggled through media interviews this week, visibly unable to tell us how many illegal migrants will be sent back to France, some of the numbers that have been released in recent days are truly pathetic.
According to some estimates, this “plan” will be limited to just 50 illegal migrants a week, or 1.5 per cent of all those who arrived in Britain since the crisis began.
Just 1.5 per cent.
To put that ‘50 a week’ in context, more than 1,000 illegal migrants arrived in Britain on just one day last month. Nearly 50,000 have arrived since Labour took power.
Over the course of one year, it would mean returning 2,600 illegal migrants while watching upwards of 50,000 arrive and then, on top of all that, having to take another load of “legitimate” asylum-seekers from France.
It’s not just bonkers; it’s outrageous.
And the underlying logic doesn’t make sense, either.
If you are an illegal migrant or people smuggler, the odds are still running firmly in your favour. You try to come to Britain illegally. Maybe you make it, maybe you’re sent back to France.
Either way, if you are sent back you can apply to become a legitimate asylum-seeker and come again, or you can just take another chance on a boat.
Which is why even the French are already saying this will be a disaster, with the head of the northern region of France and the Mayor of Calais both warning, yesterday, that all this will do is create another major “pull factor” for hundreds of thousands if not millions of migrants to head to France in the hope of moving on to Britain, either illegally or through a new “legal” route.
And then, on top of all that, is the sight of the French now saying they will pick and choose who they accept back from Britain, making it clear they will refuse anybody who poses a security risk to the French (leaving them, presumably, with us).
Sorry, but is this Pick N’ Mix an illegal migrant, now? And why on earth are we even allowing the French to have such influence over our own border security?
This, too, is the very opposite of what the British people want. They want a migration policy that reflects the interests of the British people, not Emmanuel Macron.
And because nobody in Westminster has the guts to re-establish the supremacy of UK laws —including by leaving the European Convention on Human Rights—what exactly is going to stop one lawyer after another fighting the removal of migrants back to France, claiming that doing so might threaten their “rights” under Articles 3 and 8 of the ECHR? Has anybody in government actually thought this through?
All this is merely the latest example of Sell Out Starmer –a man who on everything from Chagos to the India deal, from the EU trade deal to this, has continuously sold the interests and rights of the British people down the river.
And, lastly, to top it all off we were also given the truly hideous sight of French President Macron blaming, yes, you guessed it, Brexit for this crisis.
But this argument, too, though popular in Brussels, Oxford and Cambridge, is idiocy.
The small boats crisis began long before Britain left the EU and Brexit has nothing to do with why a similar invasion has been unfolding across the EU for 15 years.
And even when Britain was a member of the EU, under the so-called Dublin convention, we hardly sent back any illegal migrants or asylum-seekers while European Courts routinely got in the way of these efforts to return migrants.
In fact, when we were in the EU we often took more migrants than we sent back, which I suspect will now happen again through Starmer’s gimmick.
And what Starmer and Macron are not telling you is that if we were still in the EU we would currently be under enormous pressure to “share the burden” by taking in yet more asylum-seekers through the EU migration and asylum pact.
They are, once again, gaslighting you, treating you like morons.
So, how would you fix it Matt?
Well, as I’ve consistently said, for years, we need to return to being a self-governing, sovereign nation with full control over our borders and laws.
That means leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, the ECHR. It means reforming if not repealing and replacing Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act, the HRA.
It means, once we’ve re-established the supremacy of UK law (which Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda plan never established), immediately detaining and deporting anybody who arrives illegally to an offshore processing centre, well away from the British people.
It means reforming the expansion and dodgy immigration tribunals here in Britain and curtailing the right of activist lawyers to launch one judicial review after another.
And it means pushing forward leaders who actually have what Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper, and pretty much everybody in Westminster currently lack —the courage and guts to stand up to The Blob and overturn the status-quo, not just introduce endless gimmicks while fuelling public anger with the entire political system.
We can stop this crisis if we really wanted to. We can secure our borders if we really wanted to. We can reassert our culture, identity, and way of life if we really wanted to.
And we can stop this country from taking a turn toward something much darker and angrier if we really wanted to.
What this will require is pushing forward people who are the very opposite of those who rule over us today —pushing forward people who will do whatever it takes to fix our borders and ultimately, put the British people first. And people who can see, clearly, that if we don’t do this quickly we will soon be forced to grapple with much, much bigger problems in this country.
Paid Subscribers can join me on Monday at 4pm BST on the Substack App to discuss this and other issues. Upgrade now to join our community. Pensioners, emergency workers, students and veterans can get a discount by e-mailing matt@mattgoodwin.org
We are an island nation. What is the point of the Royal Navy if we can’t protect our borders? The majority of the people in the UK want our country to be governed by Laws of our own making. We have always welcomed genuine refugees but the scale of these mostly economic migrants is beyond our capacity to accommodate. Both our language and our culture are in peril.
We need you, Matt, as Home Secretary in a Reform Government.