Acting Upstream

Labour members have long used the party conference to push for a more humanitarian approach to immigration and asylum. In Liverpool this week, however, at the redeveloped docks from which more than five million Europeans travelled to America at the end of the 19th century, the only progressive motion on immigration was arbitrarily ruled out of order.

On Tuesday afternoon, delegates were instead invited to debate a motion that would have committed the party to ‘establish a new Border Security Command’, ‘negotiate additional returns arrangements to speed up returns’, ‘increase the number of safe countries to which failed asylum seekers can swiftly be returned’ and ‘deliver new counter-terror powers to tackle organised immigration crime’. It pledged to ‘act upstream’ to stop ‘the humanitarian crises’ that fuelled immigration.

Keir Starmer made his keynote speech immediately before the immigration debate. He condemned the ‘violent thuggery’ of this summer’s riots. It was the rioting he had a problem with, he reassured us, rather than anyone’s ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration. ‘It’s always been about control. That is what people have voted for time and again.’

When it became clear that most major unions were preparing to oppose the motion on Border Security Command, it was withdrawn to avoid embarrassment. The conference chair, Gurinder Josan, read out a statement on behalf of the proposing constituency, asserting that the anti-migrant measures were ‘already party policy’ and that it trusted the leadership to implement the contents of the motion without the need for a vote. In her conference speech, Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, reminded delegates that the Border Security Command had already been set up within days of Labour’s taking power in July.

The week before the conference, Keir Starmer had been in Rome. Italy has been governed since 2022 by the Fratelli d’Italia, a party with deep roots in the fascist tradition. The prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, once said that Mussolini was ‘a good politician’. This summer, she had to distance herself from her party’s youth wing after footage emerged of members giving fascist salutes and chanting ‘Sieg Heil’. The speaker of the Senate, Ignazio La Russa, has a collection of fascist memorabilia in his home. Keir Starmer is a former human rights lawyer leading Europe’s largest party of the centre-left. He went to Rome to praise Meloni’s ‘remarkable progress’ in reducing irregular migration, which has fallen by around 60 per cent this year.

Media coverage of the visit focused on a new agreement, signed last November, between Italy and Albania. After being picked up at sea by Italian ships, migrants can expect to be held in detention centres in the Albanian cities of Shëngjin and Gjadër. Some 36,000 people will have their claims processed offshore each year. Human Rights Watch has described the arrangement as a ‘blueprint for abuse’. Amnesty International calls it ‘harmful and unlawful’. The UK government is much warmer to the idea. Cooper has been at pains to point out how it differs from the Conservatives’ Rwanda plan, which Labour opposed.

The most significant factor in Meloni’s success at driving down irregular arrivals is the externalisation of Italy’s borders. The policy is not new. A Memorandum of Understanding was signed between Italy and one of Libya’s rival governments in February 2017, negotiated not by a far-right Italian administration but by a centre-left one and backed by the European Union. European states provide the authorities in Tripoli with cash and equipment; in return, the Libyans stop migrants from reaching Europe. A similar agreement was signed between Turkey and the EU in 2016. Meloni has sought to expand on the arrangements with other North African countries, an initiative known as the Rome Process. Her speech at the Trans-Mediterranean Migration Forum in Tripoli in August would sound familiar to a British audience, decrying the ‘criminal organisations’ who ‘make lots of money using the desperation of fragile people’.

European politicians like to talk in terms of cross-border co-operation and ‘working upstream’ to solve the migrant crisis. Helpfully for social democrats like Starmer, this language implies an agenda of humanitarianism and internationalism. In reality, the externalisation of European borders in Libya – a country at risk of falling back into civil war – has produced a vast network of detention centres, many of them run by traffickers and militias. People arriving either from the south or from failed attempts to cross the Mediterranean face torture and ransom demands. Some have been shot while trying to escape. In the Tariq al-Sikka centre in Tripoli, they describe sexual violence and forced labour. Mohamed al-Khoja, who ran Tariq al-Sikka, was promoted to the head of Libya’s Directorate for Combating Illegal Migration in December 2021.

In an era of climate breakdown, no amount of aid will stop the movement of refugees northwards. Italy’s agreements with Libya are dressed in euphemism but tacitly acknowledge this fact: that if Europe is not willing to open its borders, it will have to use brute force. Figures like Meloni are the most convincing champions of such a policy, but the convergence between the far right and the supposedly progressive centre is increasingly stark. Starmer ended his visit to Rome by pledging €4.75 million towards Italy’s border security efforts. At least we have clarity. Some might view the mass graveyard of the Mediterranean and the detention camps of North Africa as a nightmare. Starmer thinks they are a model.