Phillipson Insists Albania was Never Intended for ‘Return Hubs’ Scheme – Guido Fawkes

Phillipson Insists Albania was Never Intended for ‘Return Hubs’ Scheme

mdi-fullscreen

Keir Starmer’s trip to Albania to help ‘break the crime web fuelling illegal migration across the Western Balkans’ didn’t go quite to plan yesterday, as his headline-grabbing “return hubs” proposal hit a snag  when prime candidate Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama immediately made clear that any UK return hubs would not be set up in his country. Could they not have seen that coming?

This morning education secretary Bridget Phillipson was dispatched to contain the fallout. On Times Radio, she insisted Albania was never on the cards:

“This was never intended to be part of our discussions with Albania. We already knew the position of the Albanian government to have an exclusive arrangement with Italy. I think people are rather overreading the discussions around Albania. It was never our intention, never the prime minister’s intention to have that discussion with the Albanian prime minister because we already knew the government’s position on this matter.”

That’s despite the official Home Office document outlining the return hubs proposal referring specifically to countries in the Western Balkans – a region that includes Albania. And when asked which countries are actually in talks with the UK, Phillipson couldn’t name any. Meanwhile, the scheme means taxpayers are paying for asylum seeker hotels in two countries at the same time: first for housing asylum seekers in UK hotels while claims are processed, then again to fund agreements with other countries to take them once rejected. Starmer probably wishing he hadn’t scrapped the Rwanda scheme now…