Sir Keir Starmer kicked off his planned “reset” of UK-EU relations this week with two charm offensives. The first targeted Europe, where David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, met with his counterparts in Germany, Sweden and Poland.
Arriving in Warsaw, Mr Lammy was ebullient, flinging out his arms as if to threaten his Polish counterpart, Radoslaw Sikorski, with a bear hug. Another picture showed him at the head of a conference table with Annalena Baerbock, the German foreign minister, as the pair watched football on a laptop. The message from Labour was clear: the Europhiles, or “adults”, as some of the British commentariat call them, are back.
Labour’s second campaign was pitched to the British public. As Mr Lammy toured Europe, the new Prime Minister, with a hint of Trumpian gusto, declared: “I do think that we can get a much better deal than the botched deal that Boris Johnson saddled the UK with.”
How Sir Keir intends to achieve this remains to be seen. But the principal obstacles to a “better” deal haven’t changed since 2020: Brussels still wants more control over UK sovereign affairs, including its borders, than the British people are willing to surrender.
Here is where the two campaigns are liable to collide. Sir Keir this week said he wants to negotiate a replacement for the Dublin Agreement, a mutual migrant returns deal that existed pre-Brexit between the UK and EU. As part of this deal, Britain will request access to Eurodac, the EU’s fingerprint database for migrants, in exchange for potentially accepting migrants from Europe with family ties in the UK. Britain’s border force could use this data to expedite the processing of asylum applications by rejecting those who’ve already been turned away from Europe on the same grounds.
However, the response from officials in Brussels was frostier than Sir Keir might have hoped. “The big question is what’s in it for us ?” one EU diplomat told this paper. Brussels is concerned that the UK could use the information as a “Trojan Horse’’ to try to return migrants to the EU countries they came from. Indeed, the data would be quite useless if Britain couldn’t remove any migrants as a result.
But try as we might, Britain has no leverage to force EU member states to accept returns based on Eurodac data. Publicly shaming the EU into adhering to its own rules and returning migrants to their original country of asylum has so far proven ineffective, particularly with those arriving to the UK from France. The only other option would be to appeal to migrants’ countries of origin to take back failed asylum applicants, but this hasn’t worked either, as these countries are often deemed unsafe by the courts (if only a safe country in, say, Africa were willing to take them?).
EU diplomats told The Telegraph that, in exchange for access to Eurodac, Brussels would likely demand a wider returns agreement – possibly drawing the UK into the EU quota system for sharing the burden of migrants among member states. Sir Keir, dashing his pro-EU hat to once again drape himself in the Union Jack, boohooed the idea – saying any returns deal would only apply to family reunification.
It’s worth noting that even this more limited concession could cause a glut of asylum claims in Britain, where chain migration has in recent years driven up numbers considerably. And to what end? Britain would gain data on migrants from Europe only to be unable to deport them. This would amount to “little more than an audit trail of failure,” as Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister, recently characterised the EU Migration Pact, of which Eurodac is a part.
The deal could indeed present a Trojan Horse for Britain. By building a reliance on Eurodac data into our asylum process, it could become dependent on Brussels’ goodwill for it to function. For those old enough to remember how the EU acted during the pandemic, when it threatened to requisition factories producing Covid vaccines for Britain, this reliance might seem ill-advised. It is also unnecessary, as migrants arriving illegally in Britain should not be eligible for asylum, and the need for further investigation could – with the right political will – stop there.
The precious few immigration success stories on the Continent suggest that the only way for Britain to regain control of its borders is to become self-reliant: Denmark beefed up its asylum laws and saw numbers plummet; Poland built border fences that have kept migrants out; Greece and Belgium have deterred crossings by turning back migrant boats at sea.
All of these methods cut numbers and, significantly, were not only done independently of the EU – but carried out despite stern rebukes from Brussels. Britain should join the club and use the natural advantages afforded to it as an island to become, as much as possible, an immigration autarky.