What else can you do but laugh? Former human rights supremo Sir Keir Starmer has done a deal to tackle illegal migrants with Giorgia Meloni – who is called ‘the heir to Mussolini’ by many on the left and in the media.
The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, was in Rome at the weekend with a team of civil servants and police chiefs to put the finishing touches on the deal with Italy’s Interior Minister, Matteo Piantedosi.
The deal will create what the Home Office grandiosely describes as ‘a new taskforce with Mafia-busting style tactics to seize the ill-gotten gains of criminal people smuggling gangs’.
Cooper also took part in a half-hour chat with Piantedosi on the stage at the youth festival of Meloni’s right-wing Brothers of Italy party which many on the left insinuate is similar to the fascist rallies of old. Mischievously asked by the moderator about who on stage was left wing or right wing, the Home Secretary avoided giving a proper answer.
‘I think this is something that unites us because everyone should be deeply concerned about the gangs that put lives at risk… It’s wrong, it’s deeply wrong what they are doing…. This is dangerous. It undermines border security. It is deeply damaging. And that is what we have to tackle whether you are left, right, centre, whoever you are, the gangs are wrong and we should be going after them.’
Cooper said elsewhere: ‘Italy is a world leader in taking down the highest harm criminals and disrupting its own mafia-style gangs, making them a strong partner for us to work with. Our new joint taskforce with our Italian counterparts sends a clear message to the criminal people-smuggling gangs: We are coming for your money.’
The joint people smuggler force is the first tangible result of Sir Keir’s meeting in Rome in September with Meloni: the woman the media usually call ‘hard’ or ‘far’ right and who has just been named ‘the most influential person in Europe’ by the US media platform Politico.
Sir Keir had come to seek Meloni’s advice on how to stop illegal migrants because, he said, her strategy is ‘very interesting’.
That strategy is simple: the only way to stop illegal migrants is to stop them setting off across the Mediterranean. Once they reach Europe – thanks to all those human rights laws Sir Keir knows like the back of his hand – it is virtually impossible to deport them.
Meloni has been the driving force behind various EU deals with North African countries to pay them with a mix of investment and loans to stop migrants setting off – above all with Tunisia which has become the main departure point in the Central Mediterranean. She has meanwhile continued Italy’s payments to Libya to do the same thing. As a result, this year migrant arrivals by sea to Italy are down 60 per cent on last year from 153,621 to 64,846.
Many on the left say such deals are inhuman. According to Médecins sans Frontières, which operates migrant rescue vessels in the Mediterranean, the Tunisia deal ‘makes the EU directly complicit in the ongoing abuse’ of migrants trapped in the country. A Guardian editorial said that Meloni and her colleagues have been ‘at the vanguard of a drive to put some of the world’s most vulnerable people out of sight and out of mind… Ms Meloni is no role model for Labour.’ Yet it is Meloni’s ‘upstream’ solutions which appeal to Sir Keir and his Home Secretary.
The other key part of Meloni’s strategy is to offshore migrants from safe countries to identification and detention centres in Albania. The aim is to fast-track their asylum applications and deportations.
In recent years, the country of origin that has topped the league table for migrant arrivals to Italy is Bangladesh, followed not far behind by Egypt, neither of which is at war.
The Albania scheme aims to process up to 3,000 safe country migrants a month, but perhaps more importantly to act as a deterrent.
The scheme has yet to get off the ground, however, because two courts in Rome have refused to validate the detention of the first migrants taken there on the grounds that Bangladesh and Egypt are not safe countries. As a result the migrants were taken from Albania to Italy where they are at liberty while their asylum applications are dealt with. The process can take years. Many just disappear inside Italy, or else head north to countries where it’s easier to work and get welfare – such as Britain.
The Rome judges based their decisions on a European Court of Justice ruling in October that the Czech government could not deport a Moldovan because a part of Moldova is unsafe.
The Meloni government has appealed to Italy’s Supreme Court – the Court of Cassation – which is expected to rule by the end of the year. Meanwhile no migrants are being sent to Albania.
Yes, Sir Keir, author of an 883 page legal tome on human rights from his time as a top human rights lawyer, has ditched the Tory Rwanda scheme. But he is interested in Meloni’s Albania scheme – as are countless other European leaders – and his government has been in talks with Iraq about setting up a similar scheme there. In November, the UK signed a deal to pay Iraq to clamp down on people smugglers and to take back failed Iraqi asylum seekers from Britain more quickly.
As the Home Secretary told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg: ‘The interesting thing about the Italy/Albania arrangement… is that at the heart of this is a plan to effectively fast-track cases from predominantly safe countries… We’re interested in doing that in the UK.’
Labour’s deal with the Meloni government aims above all to disrupt the money flow of the people smugglers. This means tackling informal banking systems – such as Hawala – used in Arab countries and South Asia, by which a person in one country wanting to transfer money pays it to an agent, who then contacts a partner in another country to pay the final recipient.
Such money transfers by-pass banks and are much harder to track and intercept. But as the Home Office statement said: ‘Italy is considered a world-leader in tackling gangs as it has considerable success in cracking down on organised immigration crime and Mafia gangs.’
Stopping the people smugglers is fundamental to the Meloni migrant strategy but in the end it is the huge demand that creates them. During an hour-long speech delivered with electric intensity, on the closing day of her party’s youth festival, she said:
‘What is the central significance of the centres in Albania? The central significance of the centres is deterrence. If the only objective of those who disembark in Italy is to enter Europe you can appreciate that to disembark outside the borders of the EU changes everything. This is the point.
It’s why among all the initiatives and measures enacted by Italy and the EU in all these years regarding immigration the Albania Protocol is the one that’s most feared by the traffickers of human beings. Which means that stopping the scheme would be the greatest favour that we can do to these criminals…
I wonder if those judges who worked so hard not to validate the detention of those migrants that should have gone to Albania with rulings that I have already said and repeat are totally unreasonable really asked themselves about the consequences of their decisions because I’m convinced the priority of the overwhelming majority of judges is… to combat every kind of Mafia including the Mafia del mare.’
She ended the speech with her voice rising to an electrifying crescendo:
‘So, have faith, the centres in Albania will work. They! Will! Work!… They! Will! Work!… Because I will combat the Ma-fi-a! And I ask the entire Italian state and all decent people to help me combat the Mafia!’
The Cooper-Piantedosi agreement is not exactly the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviets and the Nazis in 1939. But it is yet more evidence of the left moving right and not vice versa – at least on illegal migration.
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