‘Stop the boasts’ is a good soundbite on immigration, but what would Labour actually do?

Would Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper really be any better at dealing with asylum applications, asks John Rentoul

It is only in government that Starmer and Cooper will be in a position to negotiate with the French and the EU (PA)

Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, knows how to wound. She told Rishi Sunak he should “stop the boasts”. That play on words strikes at the heart of the prime minister’s error of judgement.

He should never have promised to “stop” the boats, because cutting the number by one-third looks like a failure instead of reasonable progress in dealing with a difficult problem. If he had promised to “tackle” the boats, the British public would hardly regard his record last year as a success but Cooper’s attack would have stung a little less.

As for Sunak’s boast of having cleared the “legacy” backlog of asylum claims by the turn of the year, Cooper is again playing politics on easy mode. How insulting can the prime minister be to think that by setting an arbitrary date and promising to process all applications made before it, while applications after the date continue to pile up, he can say “job done”?

Especially when, as Cooper points out, thousands of those old applicants have disappeared into the informal economy and others have been moved into a “too difficult” pile? The government has managed to speed up processing a bit, which is a worthwhile achievement, but has obscured it by overclaiming.

Cooper’s point-scoring is all very well but 2024 is the year when the heat of scrutiny is going to turn on to the Labour Party. So, apart from not boasting about unattainable objectives and claiming that dealing with older applications is dealing with them all, what would Labour do?

Cooper has held the line so far with a five-point plan which is little more than a press release. The only point of potential substance is a promise to secure a “new agreement” with France and other countries, presumably including collectively through the EU, “on returns and family reunion”.

It is plausible that a Labour government could achieve more in negotiation with Emmanuel Macron, Ursula von der Leyen and other European leaders than Sunak could, although Sunak’s relations with Macron and Von der Leyen seem positive at a personal level.

Unfortunately for Labour, though, that does bring back the problem of Brexit, and of Labour appearing to want to go back into reciprocal deals on migration. Maybe people who voted Leave because they wanted less immigration think that the Conservatives have delivered the opposite – but they are probably disinclined to think that getting closer to France or to the EU generally is the answer to the problem.

In any case, the nub of the problem is “returns”. No law-abiding democracy in the world has ever returned a significant number of failed asylum seekers. France has never been willing to accept our rejects, and the EU mechanism for returning asylum seekers to the first safe country they reached never worked when we were a member of the EU.

Even when Tony Blair, the most pro-EU prime minister since Edward Heath took us into the common market in 1973, was in charge, he was thinking the unthinkable, as last week’s release of cabinet papers from 2003 confirms. He considered repudiating the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR); building a prison camp on the island of Mull; and setting up asylum processing centres in Turkey, Kenya and South Africa.

No doubt a Labour government would continue where he left off – possibly excluding the bit about the ECHR. The week before the 20-year-old cabinet papers were published, it was reported that Starmer was discussing plans to process some asylum claims abroad. The party took fright and denied that “detailed plans” had been drawn up. But that was in 2023. Now it is the year of clarity about Labour policy.

Even so, those wanting details may have to wait until after the election. It is only in government, after all, that Starmer and Cooper will be in a position to negotiate with the French and the EU, and any other countries that might host offshore processing centres.

All we can expect from Labour is that it will grapple with the same difficult problems with which the Tories – and past Labour governments – have struggled, with roughly the same degree of success. In other words, a Labour government will mostly fail to reduce immigration and asylum claims as much as public opinion wants. But at least it won’t boast that it is succeeding.