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Britain’s new Prime Minister Keir Starmer yesterday said he would scrap a controversial plan to fly thousands of asylum seekers from Britain to Rwanda in his first major policy announcement since winning a landslide election victory.
The previous Conservative government first announced the plan in 2022 to send migrants who arrived in Britain without permission to the East African nation, saying it would put an end to asylum seekers arriving on small boats.
But no one was sent to Rwanda under the plan because of years of legal challenges.
At his first Press conference since becoming prime minister, Starmer said that the Rwanda policy would be scrapped because only about one per cent of asylum seekers would have been removed and it would have failed to act as a deterrent.
“The Rwanda scheme was dead and buried before it started. It’s never been a deterrent,” Starmer said. “I’m not prepared to continue with gimmicks that don’t act as a deterrent.”
Starmer won one of the largest parliamentary majorities in modern British history on Friday, making him the most powerful British leader since former Prime Minister Tony Blair, but he faces a number of challenges, including improving struggling public services and reviving a weak economy.
At the Press conference in Downing Street, Starmer answered about a dozen questions and was repeatedly asked about how and when he would start delivering on his promises to fix the nation’s problems, but he gave few specifics about what he planned.
Asked if he was willing to take tough decisions and raise taxes if necessary, Starmer said his government would identify problems and act in areas such as tackling an overstretched prisons system and reducing the long waiting times to use the state-run health service.
“We’re going to have to take the tough decisions and take them early, and we will. We will do that with a raw honesty,” he said. “But that is not a sort of prelude to saying there’s some tax decision that we didn’t speak about before.”
Starmer said he would set up and chair different “mission delivery boards” to focus on so-called missions or priority areas such as the health service and economic growth.
The question of how to stop the asylum seekers crossing from France was a major theme of the six-week election campaign.
While supporters say it would smash the model of people traffickers, critics have argued the Rwanda policy was immoral and would never work.
Last November, the UK Supreme Court declared the policy unlawful, saying Rwanda could not be considered a safe third country, prompting ministers to sign a new treaty with the East African country and to pass new legislation to override this.
The legality of that move was being challenged by charities and unions in the courts.
The British government has already given the Rwandan government hundreds of millions of pounds to set up accommodation and hire extra officials to process the asylum seekers, money it cannot recover.
Starmer has said his government would create a Border Security Command that would bring together staff from the police, the domestic intelligence agency and prosecutors to work with international agencies to stop people smuggling.
Sonya Sceats, chief executive of Freedom from Torture, one of the many organisations and charities which have campaigned to stop the Rwanda plan welcomed Starmer’s announcement yesterday.
“We applaud Keir Starmer for moving immediately to close the door on this shameful scheme that played politics with the lives of people fleeting torture and persecution,” she said.
Yesterday was a day of firsts: Keir Starmer’s first full day as Prime Minister and the first cabinet meeting of the new Labour government.
It was also a chance to reflect on the election results – from when the first MP (Labour’s Bridget Phillipson) won her seat just before 23:30 on Thursday all the way through to the final declation for the Lib Dems’ Angus MacDonald in Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire.
The work has already started, the new Premier said yesterday, as he outlined pledges to tackle issues with prisons and the NHS.
As for the new opposition, attention is turning to who could take over from Rishi Sunak as Tory party leader, once plans are in place to choose his successor.
Some more details have emerged from the first cabinet meeting, during which Starmer is said to have told his top team that he expects them to hold themselves and their departments to the “highest standards of integrity and honesty”.
A Downing Street readout from the meeting said the prime minister told ministers “the whole country was looking to the government to deliver on their priorities”.
His ministers also outlined their priorities, with Chancellor Rachel Reeves highlighting “stability, investment and reform”, and deputy prime minister Angela Rayner promising to “reset relationships with regional metro mayors”, according to No 10.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting said “the policy of the government is that the NHS is currently broken and we must return to an NHS that is there when people need it, with fewer lives lost to the biggest killers, in a fairer society where everyone lives well for longer”.
While Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said delivering more neighbourhood police, tackling knife crime and launching a new border security command would be “an immediate priority”.
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