Keir Starmer previously said Sunak’s policies were neither a deterrent nor good value for money.
London:
Britain’s new Labor Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Saturday he was “unwilling” to continue the previous Conservative government’s flagship program to deport migrants to Rwanda.
“The Rwanda plan was dead and buried before it started… I am not prepared to continue with gimmicks that have no deterrent effect,” he told reporters at his first press conference.
Ex-prime minister Rishi Sunak has put his political reputation on the line with his “stop-the-boat” plan, pushing through the controversial deportation plan despite opposition from rights groups and court rulings.
However, Labor said it would jettison the plan to remove people crossing the English Channel by boat into Rwanda from northern France.
Immigration has become an increasingly central political issue since Britain left the European Union in 2020, largely on a promise to take back control of the country’s borders.
Starmer previously said Sunak’s policies were neither a deterrent nor good value for money.
He has promised to tackle the issue ‘upstream’ by destroying the people smuggling gangs behind the border crossings.
Central to the policy would be a new “elite” Border Security Command, made up of immigration and law enforcement specialists, as well as the domestic intelligence agency MI5, he said.
An estimated 12,313 people have crossed into Britain so far this year, an increase of 18 percent on the same period last year, the Home Office said last month.
There were 29,437 arrivals for all of 2023, a drop of 36 percent from the record 45,774 arrivals in 2022.
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