Home Office Filled With Ministers Who Opposed Border Controls as Starmer Promises Small Boat ‘Crackdown’ – Guido Fawkes

Home Office Filled With Ministers Who Opposed Border Controls as Starmer Promises Small Boat ‘Crackdown’

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Keir Starmer is Albania today to unveil the expansion of the so-called Joint Migration Task Force in his latest attempt to show he’s cracking down on illegal migration and the small boats crisis. Guido has already flagged the Cabinet’s long-standing opposition to migration controls. Home Office ministers are no exception:

• Angela Eagle, minister for border security and asylum, told a Refugee Council event at Labour conference last September that migrants in Britain struggle to “rise above the constant drumbeat of toxic anti-immigration, anti-immigrant rhetoric that has become emboldened, not only in Britain but across the western countries.” ‘Island of strangers’ may not have gone down well with her…
• Diana Johnson, minister for crime prevention, signed a letter from hard left MP Nadia Whittome in February 2020 calling for 50 dangerous offenders not to be deported on a flight to Jamaica. The letter also said “The Home Office must immediately provide SIM cards for alternative providers in order to ensure that no one will be removed from the UK without being afforded effective access to legal advice and assistance.” Starmer also signed that letter…
  • In a 2021 Commons debate on the Nationality and Borders Bill, Johnson declared: “It perpetuates the myth that the UK is overwhelmed by asylum seekers and refugees to fit the Government’s political agenda” adding “I am particularly worried about the lack of safe and legal routes for immigration, particularly in the case of family reunion.”
• Seema Malhotra, migration minister, has a long track record of opposing basic enforcement measures. In a 2021 Commons debate on the Nationality and Borders Bill, she slammed proposals to strip citizenship from dangerous individuals without notification, seeking the removal of “clause 9… which would deprive UK nationals of citizenship without notice… I cannot support the Home Secretary’s clause, which has breathed huge distrust and insecurity into the lives of millions of peaceful, law-abiding people.”
  • She also argued for lower visa fees and to make it easier to regularise illegal migrants in 2021, saying: “As a first step, we should simplify the process to make it easier for those who are undocumented to become regularised, and reform the extremely high fees, which mean that people cannot pay for visa applications.”

• Home secretary Yvette Cooper wanted every city town and borough to take 10 refugee families.
  • In 2015 she held up a sign saying ‘refugees welcome’ and said the Government needed to do more to help refugees.

In 2021, Angela Eagle, Diana Johnson, security minister Dan Jarvis, and safeguarding minister Jess Phillips all voted against life sentences for people smuggling gangs – as part of Labour’s opposition to the Tories’ Nationality and Borders Act. Home Office civil servants, meanwhile, have long resisted serious migration controls. Back in 2022 they used an officially organised online consultation to discuss how to block the Tories’ Rwanda scheme, even comparing themselves to Nazis “only obeying orders”, and later threatened to strike if made to implement what they called the ‘unlawful’ policy. ‘Smashing the gangs’ may prove tricky with this lot in charge…