'ISLAND OF STRANGERS'
Hundreds of illegal migrants cross Channel DURING Keir’s speech promising to ‘take back control’ of our borders
The Prime Minister set out his plans to reduce legal migration just as hundreds of migrants arrived on small boats
HUNDREDS of migrants crossed the Channel in small boats this morning - as Sir Keir Starmer stood in Downing Street promising to “take back control” of Britain’s borders.
Just as the Prime Minister told the country “nobody should be getting on a small boat”, dinghies packed with men set off from Calais and arrived on UK shores.
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Videos posted on social media showed groups of migrants - some masked and wearing Palestinian colours - grinning and giving thumbs up as they launched into the Channel.
It marked an awkward backdrop for the Prime Minister, who was attempting to draw a line under years of soaring migration figures.
Sir Keir announced sweeping reforms to legal migration - targeting work and family visas with stricter requirements on language, education, and integration.
He pledged to raise standards across the board and close routes blamed for record levels of arrivals, including banning new overseas care workers from coming to Britain.
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But he was immediately hit by a backlash after failing to outline new measures to tackle illegal crossings.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said the PM was presiding over the worst year “in history” for migrant small boat Channel crossings and accused him of having “no credibility on this issue”.
And Reform UK boss Nigel Farage blasted: "This government will not do what it takes to control our borders."
He added: "On the day of Keir Starmer’s big fightback against Reform UK, 250 young men are already crossing the Channel by 8am."
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More than 12,000 small boat migrants have now crossed this year, with GB News reporting another 400 arrived this morning.
Speaking from Downing Street this morning, the PM said: "We will deliver what you've asked for time and again.
Fury as hotel firm housing asylum seekers in ‘all-inclusive resort’ paid £700m a year of YOUR money
"And we will take back control of our borders.
"And let me tell you why, because I know on a day like today, people who like politics will try to make this all about politics...
"No, I'm doing this because it is right, because it is fair and because it is what I believe in."
The PM argued the UK needed strict and understandable rules on immigration or risk "becoming an island of strangers”.
He said the pre-existing immigration system was “almost designed to permit abuse” and had to change.
He promised immigration numbers will fall under his Government, saying: “Make no mistake, this plan means migration will fall.
"That is a promise. But I want to be very clear on this. If we do need to take further steps, if we do need to do more to release pressure on housing and our public services then mark my words, we will.”
Keir Starmer's migration overhaul....
- Ten-Year Wait for UK citizenship: Foreigners must now live here for a decade before they can call Britain home.
- Pay In, Get In: Those who graft and pay taxes could jump the queue for residency rights. Public service workers and top-skilled pros to be fast-tracked.
- Speak English or Stay Out: Language test bar raised across all immigration routes
- No Degree? No Deal: Migrants will require a uni degree to gain a skilled worker visa.
- Skills Shortage Jobs No Longer a Shortcut: Loopholes shut. Firms can't just cry 'skills gap' to bring in cheap labour.
- Care Jobs Closed to Foreigners: Overseas hiring banned in the care sector. Roles must go to Brits first.
- Digital IDs For All: Every foreign citizen will need official digital ID to stay in the country.
- Criminals Face the Boot: Foreign crooks hiding behind “family rights” to dodge deportation will be kicked out of the country
And in a major break from Treasury orthodoxy, Sir Keir also rejected the long-held belief that high immigration fuels economic growth.
Quizzed by reporters, the PM said: “The pure theory that simply higher migration numbers necessarily leads to higher growth I think has been tested in the last four years.
“We quadrupled [net migration] in actually a very short period of time and I think whatever political persuasion you are it is quite extraordinary that net migration quadrupled in four years.
“We have never seen that before in this country but growth didn’t shift, it stayed stagnant.”
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As part of the new rules, migrants will now have to spend up to ten years in the UK before applying for citizenship.
English language tests will be toughened across all visa routes, and for the first time, family members of migrants will also need to speak the language and show a “commitment to integration”.
The care worker visa will be closed to new overseas recruits — a route ministers blame for contributing to record levels of migration.
Only “high-contributing” migrants, such as doctors and nurses, will be eligible for fast-tracked settlement.
Sir Keir also promised to stop foreign criminals using human rights laws to block deportation.
He told The Sun last night: “If you break British law, you give up your right to be here.”
He added: “Sun readers are right to wonder what’s going on when migrants with no right to be in the UK are allowed to arrive and stay, based on spurious reading of the immigration rules.
“We’re going to get a grip. As part of the Immigration White Paper that I will say more on today, we will make sure it is parliament that makes the rules on immigration."
The Sun says
ALL of a sudden, the PM and Home Secretary are talking tough on immigration.
Stricter language tests, degree-level qualifications for skilled jobs, a clampdown on human rights loopholes and an end to visas for foreign care workers.
It could be that the Government has had a remarkable conversion and now accepts that people’s concerns about the impact of mass migration on public services and our way of life are valid.
Yet the facts suggest otherwise.
Sir Keir Starmer’s first act as PM was to bin the Rwanda scheme — the only credible deterrent to the Channel boats — and his woolly promises to “smash the smuggling gangs” weren’t convincing.
So isn’t it much more likely that it’s Reform’s surge in the polls that has changed his mind?
People are fed up with being ignored.
They want Labour to stay the course — not just pay lip service to the Reform surge, then quickly revert to type.
So today’s white paper laying out the plans to slash net migration is a pivotal moment.
Nigel Farage warns it is doomed to fail, saying the measures are “tinkering around the edges”.
They also run contrary to Labour’s every instinct for open borders, so will they even be seriously enforced?
Sir Keir should know that voters will be watching — and any back-sliding will be punished heavily at the next election.
The plans come after net migration stood at 728,000 in the year to mid-2024, with most arrivals entering legally through work, study or family routes.
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The blueprint also comes after Labour and the Tories got thumped by Nigel Farage in this month’s local elections.
Reform’s hardline stance on immigration has seen them overtake Labour in the opinion polls just 10 months after last summer’s landslide election.
Finally, a Labour leader gets migrant problem. What about the rest of the party?
By HARRY COLE, Political Editor
THE Home Secretary spent the back end of last week personally writing a fiery foreword to help today’s 80-page immigration clampdown plan land with a thud.
Legal migration chancers in the university and care sectors are in her sights and she is calling time on “my kids don’t like foreign chicken nugget” type excuses for criminals and illegal immigrants to dodge deportation thanks to the absurd European Convention on Human Rights.
All good stuff, if Labour can get it through the legion of wokies and hand-wringers on their own backbenches.
But it appears there is another blocker to migration reform in Yvette Cooper’s sights: Chancellor Rachel Reeves and two decades of Treasury group thing.
She certainly had something to get off her chest on the eve of publication, taking aim directly at the fairy tale belief that more foreigners is a magic pill for Britain’s economic woes;
“If that approach was right we would have seen, when we saw that soaring level of net migration, that soaring level of overseas recruitment, well surely we would have seen soaring growth alongside it and we didn’t.”
She told the BBC: “Actually what we saw was the economy flatlined because by failing to invest in UK workers that also undermines productivity, it undermines the ability to get people back into the work who are currently not working, so alongside those record highs of overseas recruitment, we also have this big increase in people just not working here in the UK. Those things are linked.”
By jove, I think she gets it.
Finally someone in this Government is willing to shoot some sacred cows of the progressive mind.
No one ever leaves the Home Office more left-wing than they entered, so like Tory Home Office minister Robert Jenrick before her; it appears Cooper has been on a bit of a journey in the last ten months.
Long may it continue, but one swallow doesn't make a summer, and there are plenty of battles for the Home Secretary ahead.
I hear there has already been significant kickback from the Treasury at today’s Immigration White Paper that will now go through months of consultation and yabber before being legislated over.
A good opening salvo from Cooper, but one already attempted to be strangled at birth by the Treasury still addicted to the sugar rush of cheap imported workers as they battle to breathe life into already anaemic growth forecasts for the coming years.
And the Treasury has other plans for growth too, namely unpicking Brexit in return for better access to European markets.
Yesterday the Home Sec was talking in terms of tens of thousands for what these new plans could do to reduce legal migration in the coming year or so… just as the Government finally admitted - after months of lying - that they will offer up similar numbers to the European Union.
In a bid to unblock the PM and Chancellor’s quest for a Brexit reset and a new defence and security deal with the bloc, free movement is back on the table.
Ever since the EU’s request for a Youth Mobility Scheme for the under 40s were revealed last August the Government had insisted they had “no plans” to engage with such a proposal.
A return of free movement for the under-40s is the basic gist, allowing younger Europeans to once again pour into the UK to study and work.
Again and again ministers and spinners insisted on the record there were “no plans” for such a scheme, yet all the while they were secretly and misleadingly building negotiations with Brussels around accepting it.
Now they tell us “a smart, controlled youth mobility scheme would of course have benefits for our young people”.
The plan all along.
Leaving aside the rampant dishonesty, what is this going to do for legal migration figures?
What is the point in taking away with one hand, only to dish out tens of thousands more visas with the other?
No10 insiders insist that such a scheme will be tightly capped, but we all know the British state is pretty useless at keeping a track of this stuff.
Remember when we were told there were only three million EU citizens in the UK during Brexit, only for closer to SIX MILLION to apply to stay after the Leave vote.
The bungling Office of National Statistics has no idea how many foreigners are really here, dramatically scaling up their predictions last year after finding an extra 166,000 migrants down the back of the sofa.
Or what of the news that the bill for asylum hotels was actually not the £4.5 billion projected, but was some £10 billion more?
The British state is crap at counting this stuff, so be very wary of promises of strict oversight, control or watchful eyes and caps.
Yvette Cooper may be on the right path, but her biggest fights are still to come.
If we are simply going to cave to Brussels and let tens of thousands of Europeans back into the country, this must come at the price of even tighter restrictions on visas elsewhere.
Anything less than that renders today’s migration “clampdown” purely performative.
Someone better tell the Treasury though…
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