Call the police! Keir Starmer has stolen Rishi Sunak’s clothes

With their plan to treat people smugglers as terrorists, Labour has pulled off the Great Policy Robbery – and won’t stop there, writes John Rentoul

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper visiting the Netherlands, for talks with the EU’s Europol law enforcement agency (PA) (PA Wire)

It is the biggest daylight heist since the Brink’s-Mat job. Keir Starmer has driven his electric 4x4 through the Conservatives’ shop window and made off with all of Rishi Sunak’s policies.

The Labour leader has promised to treat people smugglers as terrorists – in other words, he is copying the Tory policy of making illegal things more illegal. The squeals of outrage from the right-wing press confirm that the robbery has been successful. In fact, just as the Brink’s-Mat robbers thought they were going to steal a million in Spanish pesetas and found an extra £25m in gold bars outside the vault, Starmer may have got away with a lot more than he expected.

He started as a small-time criminal, stealing Tory policies on law and order, promising a crackdown on fly-tipping, but soon graduated to the big stuff. Now Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, says “we don’t have any plans to increase taxes outside of what we’ve said”, and voters are more likely to say Labour is a low-tax party than they are to say that about the Tories.

Today, Starmer travelled with Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, to the Netherlands for a meeting with Europol, the EU’s law enforcement organisation. This provided a photo-opportunity to serve as a backdrop for the announcement of Labour’s new plan to deal with the small boats.

As well as the use of something like anti-terrorist law against people smugglers, the plan consists of “seeking” an EU-wide returns deal that would allow some asylum seekers to be sent back to an EU member state through which they have travelled on their way to the UK.

This would be an outrage, declared The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, because it would mean a Labour government agreeing to take a share of the EU’s undocumented arrivals. It is such an unacceptable idea that it is the Conservative government’s policy. Rishi Sunak, too, has said he would like an EU-wide returns agreement.

Indeed, the criticism from the Tory press merely exposes how unworkable the government’s policy is: there is no way the EU is going to give Sunak the kind of deal that he could sell to the British public, because it would involve taking more asylum seekers than the numbers already crossing the Channel in small boats.

The paradox is that a Labour government is slightly more likely to be able to strike a deal that British voters might accept. Whatever Starmer says about not reopening the Brexit question, he would, as prime minister, have more scope to negotiate a closer relationship with the EU. And it remains obvious and true that any effective action on small boats requires cooperation between Britain and the EU, and France in particular.

Even so, the chances of any workable deal to return those arriving in small boats to the EU remain remote. Most EU countries take in more asylum seekers than Britain, so any attempt at burden-sharing is likely to mean Britain would take more. But it gives Labour something to say, and gives the appearance that its Tory-sounding rhetoric could actually be delivered.

Immigration remains a weak spot for Starmer, as Claire Ainsley, his former head of policy, wrote yesterday. A large proportion of the electorate “would prefer to allow many fewer migrants into the country”, she said, “and the Conservatives are perceived to be closer to a larger number of voters on immigration than Labour”. The voters think that the government has done a terrible job of stopping the small boats, but they tend to think that Labour would do even worse.

Hence the need for Starmer to continue to plunder the Tory warehouse. He can easily disown the Rwanda policy because it is not popular, and it is widely assumed that it would be ineffective, even if it is lawful. But the significance of his trip to Paris next week is that he can plausibly claim to be able to work better with Emmanuel Macron than Sunak can. It is a marginal advantage, because Sunak has already been friendly in the Elysee and signed a deal to pay the French to do more to police their coast. But it is the best that Starmer can do in a difficult and defensive policy area.

The Great Policy Robbery could point to problems ahead for a Labour government. If Labour policies are the same as the Tories, that would suggest that Prime Minister Starmer would face the same problems, with a similar degree of success. And if Labour’s tax and spending plans are the same as the Tories’, a Labour government wouldn’t have the money to do anything very differently in the short term.

Starmer’s tough language on people smugglers betrays the fear that a Labour government would fail on small boats just as badly as the Tories have done.