KEIR Starmer and the Labour government are playing with fire.
That’s what I thought as I watched Starmer unveil his latest ‘plan’ for stopping the small boats and fixing Britain’s spiralling border crisis. Standing alongside Emmanuel Macron, President of France, Starmer introduced something that will only further erode public trust and fuel public anger.
Britain, in case you haven’t noticed, is a tinderbox right now. You can literally feel it. As I said on television last week, thanks to years and years of being lied to and gaslit by politicians in Westminster, the British people are today a lot angrier, a lot more frustrated and a lot more disillusioned than the ruling class think.
We got a sense of it in just how quickly some people took to the streets after the Southport atrocity. You can see it, too, in how people are still taking to the streets in Northern Ireland. And you can see it in a surge of public support for Reform and what this represents: a total rejection of the establishment.
Which is why I’ve long argued that it is essential the government and the British state get their arms around this border crisis and solve it, quickly, before things get completely out of control.
But what has the hapless Sir Keir done? He’s decided to pour yet more gasoline over this tinderbox, making the country even more unstable.
The man who spent years deriding Rishi Sunak’s efforts to fix the small boat crisis through the Rwanda plan as a ‘gimmick’ has just delivered to the British people the ultimate gimmick – another trick, another sticking plaster, another reshuffling of the chairs on the deck of the Titanic.
This isn’t a serious plan for fixing our borders and restoring public trust. It is an exchange programme for illegal migrants. It is an insult to the British people.
The idea is that for every illegal migrant who enters Britain on a small boat and is returned to France, Britain will take a legitimate asylum-seeker from France.
This, Starmer and Macron say with straight faces, will smash the business model of the people-smuggling gangs, making it clear if you arrive in Britain illegally you will be sent back to France while only ‘legitimate’ asylum-seekers who have had their cases processed will be allowed to carry on to Britain.
Let me state what is immediately obvious to anybody who knows anything about border security.
This is nonsense.
For a start, it makes a total mockery of the social contract in this country.
Like me, the British people do not want ‘one in, one out’.
They want ‘none in, all out’.
What Keir Starmer and his equally hapless Home Secretary Yvette Cooper are trying to push us into is a world in which the large-scale transfer of asylum-seekers and illegal migrants into our country is considered somehow normal and acceptable.
Sorry, but no.
No. No. No.
I do not want to live in that kind of country and nor, I think, do the vast majority of British people.
Britain has already done its fair share, taking in hundreds of thousands of refugees from Hong Kong, Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Eritrea, to name only a few. Not to mention taking millions of legal migrants, and all while grappling with the worst cost-of-living crisis since the Second World War, the highest tax burden in this country since the late 1940s, and an economy that is as flat as a pancake.
Which is why most people in this country want a complete end to mass migration, not the introduction of an exchange scheme for illegal migrants.
Britain, remember, is already hosting an estimated 1.2million illegal migrants, with one in every 13 people in London thought to be here illegally. I want all those law-breakers out of the country before even considering a new scheme.
And the details behind Labour’s gimmick make zero sense.
While Yvette Cooper stuttered and struggled through media interviews, visibly unable to tell us how many illegal migrants will be sent back to France, some of the numbers that have been released in recent days are truly pathetic.
According to some estimates, this ‘plan’ will be limited to just 50 illegal migrants a week. To put that ‘50 a week’ in context, more than 1,000 illegal migrants arrived in Britain on just one day last month. Nearly 50,000 have arrived since Labour took power.
Over one year, it would mean returning 2,600 illegal migrants while watching upwards of 50,000 arrive and then, on top of all that, having to take another load of ‘legitimate’ asylum-seekers from France.
It’s not just bonkers: it’s outrageous.
The underlying logic doesn’t make sense, either. If you are an illegal migrant or people smuggler, the odds are still running firmly in your favour. You try to come to Britain illegally. Maybe you make it, maybe you’re sent back to France. If you are sent back you can apply to become a legitimate asylum-seeker and come again, or you can just take another chance on a boat.
Which is why even the French are already saying this will be a disaster, with the head of the northern region of France and the Mayor of Calais both warning that all this will do is create another major ‘pull factor’ for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of migrants to head to France in the hope of moving on to Britain, either illegally or through a new ‘legal’ route.
On top of all that, the French are now saying they will pick and choose who they accept back from Britain, making it clear they will refuse anybody who poses a security risk to the French (leaving them, presumably, with us). Why on earth are we allowing the French to have such influence over our own border security?
This is the very opposite of what the British people want. They want a migration policy that reflects the interests of the British people, not Emmanuel Macron.
And because nobody in Westminster has the guts to re-establish the supremacy of UK laws – including by leaving the European Convention on Human Rights – what exactly is going to stop one lawyer after another fighting the removal of migrants back to France, claiming that doing so might threaten their ‘rights’ under Articles 3 and 8 of the ECHR? Has anybody in government thought this through?
All this is merely the latest example of Sell Out Starmer, a man who on everything from Chagos to the India deal, from the EU trade deal to this, has constantly sold the interests and rights of the British people down the river.
To top it all off we were also given the truly hideous sight of French President Macron blaming, yes, you guessed it, Brexit for this crisis. This argument, too, though popular in Brussels, Oxford and Cambridge, is idiocy. The small boats crisis began long before Britain left the EU, and Brexit has nothing to do with why a similar invasion has been unfolding across the EU for 15 years.
Even when Britain was a member of the EU, under the so-called Dublin Convention we hardly sent back any illegal migrants or asylum-seekers while European courts routinely got in the way of these efforts to return migrants.
And what Starmer and Macron are not telling you is that if we were still in the EU we would currently be under enormous pressure to ‘share the burden’ by taking in yet more asylum-seekers through the EU migration and asylum pact.
They are, once again, gaslighting you, treating you like morons.
So how would you fix it, Matt?
As I’ve consistently said, for years, we need to return to being a self-governing, sovereign nation with full control over our borders and laws.
That means leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, the ECHR. It means reforming, if not repealing and replacing, Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act, the HRA.
It means, once we’ve re-established the supremacy of UK law (which Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda plan never established), immediately detaining and deporting anybody who arrives illegally to an offshore processing centre, well away from the British people.
It means reforming the dodgy immigration tribunals here in Britain and curtailing the rights of activist lawyers to launch one judicial review after another.
And it means pushing forward leaders who actually have what Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper and pretty much everybody in Westminster currently lack – the courage and guts to stand up to The Blob and overturn the status quo, not just introduce endless gimmicks while fuelling public anger with the entire political system.
We can stop this crisis if we really want to. We can secure our borders if we really want to. We can reassert our culture, identity, and way of life if we really want to.
And we can stop this country from taking a turn toward something much darker and angrier if we really want to.
What this will require is pushing forward people who are the very opposite of those who rule over us today – people who will do whatever it takes to fix our borders and ultimately put the British people first. And people who can see, clearly, that if we don’t do this quickly we will soon be forced to grapple with much, much bigger problems in this country.
This article appeared in Matt Goodwin on July 12, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
