Yes, Keir Starmer is angry about illegal migration – but he won’t put a stop to it

The prime minister is fond of squaring up to difficult issues – but in announcing new measures to tackle the spiralling of unchecked migration into Britain, the danger is that he only draws attention to his failures, says John Rentoul

The prime minister deserves full marks for courage. He is not afraid to face the most difficult problems head on.

He went to see Donald Trump – and when the US president insulted our ally Volodymyr Zelensky, he phoned Trump to try to mediate. He put up taxes. He cut the planned rate of increase in welfare spending. He is going to fix the NHS, decarbonise electricity and build 1.5 million homes.

And now, he is hosting an international summit meeting to talk about how to deal with illegal immigration. Representatives from more than 40 countries – and from tech giants including Meta and TikTok – met at Lancaster House on Monday and Tuesday to discuss the problem.

As Keir Starmer likes to boast, if he sees a problem, he does not “walk round it”. He knows that people feel strongly about the small boats and that the vast majority of the public think that immigration generally has been too high.

In the past, politicians have been accused of minimising the issue or of trying to change the subject, but Starmer seemed determined to identify with popular indignation. “I know many of you are angry about illegal migration,” he wrote in an article for the Daily Mail yesterday. “You’re right to be.”

And he opened the Organised Immigration Crime Summit by saying: “It makes me angry, frankly, because it’s unfair on ordinary working people who pay the price.”

Yet the summit had the unmistakable feel of a talking-shop convened in response to embarrassing headlines about the numbers arriving by small boat being higher in the first three months of this year than at this stage in any previous year.

The measures announced sounded as if they had been reheated from previous Home Office press releases. The prime minister repeated his soundbite about treating the issue like terrorism, while Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, announced £30m to disrupt people-trafficking networks – and an extra £3m to boost prosecutions.

More significantly, Cooper said that she is “looking at” how the European Convention on Human Rights applies in deportation cases. This may be important for dealing with some of the immigration tribunal cases that so offend public opinion, but it has nothing to do with the small boats.

The legal and practical obstacles to dealing with the small boats remain insuperable. Even Major General Duncan Capps, head of the small boats operational command, admitted today that stopping all migrants arriving in small boats will be “very difficult” to achieve – although he did say that it was possible to “significantly reduce” crossings.

I think public opinion would be satisfied with a significant reduction, but it is not clear how it could be achieved – and the trend at the moment is in the opposite direction.

Starmer continues to mock the Conservatives for the “ineffective, expensive gimmick” of the Rwanda scheme, but the reason that reasonable people, including Rishi Sunak and many Home Office civil servants, pressed ahead with the scheme was that stopping the boats is so difficult. Unless all arrivals can be detained indefinitely, returned to France, or removed to somewhere else, they will keep coming.

I would not be at all surprised if the Labour government ends up trying measures that are just as offensive to liberals, and indeed to party members, as the Rwanda plan was. Starmer has shown – on winter fuel, foreign aid and welfare savings – that he will be ruthless with tender Labour consciences if he feels he has to be.

He knows that he has to deliver on at least some of the ambitious promises he has made. The small boats problem is one of the most visible. He knows well the mistake that Sunak made soon after he became prime minister, of promising to “stop the boats”. Starmer has managed to avoid repeating that error – only he has promised to “smash the gangs”, which is just as impossible.

The danger for the prime minister was expressed vividly by Luke Tryl, the pollster who carries out focus groups for More in Common. A woman in a group in Peterborough after the spring statement last week said: “It’s all just terrible, and I’ve lost all hope that it can get any better.”

Tryl said: “The public have voted for change three times now: Brexit, Boris Johnson’s big majority, and Labour’s big victory last year. If they don’t get it this time, something bad is going to happen. I think the public is going to turn against the system.”

Starmer deserves praise for confronting the big problems head on. But what is much more important is solving them.