This migration deal shows what a sap Starmer is

In French, they’d call him a gogo. In English, you’d say a mug, a patsy or a sap. For the French could surely not have believed their luck to be dealing with a UK prime minister as credulous as the Keir Starmer. Whenever Starmer negotiates, everyone looking on knows that Britain is about to lose.

So it is with the new migration pact being hammered out between Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, as the French president wraps up his state visit to the UK. Earlier this week, Downing Street briefed that Starmer had been seeking a ‘one in, one out’ arrangement for illegal migrants crossing the English Channel. Under this system, France would agree to take back an illegal migrant who’d sailed to the UK on a small boat. In exchange, Britain would take in an asylum seeker with a legitimate claim. The aim would be to demonstrate that small-boats arrivals will be sent packing back to France. That the safety risk and vast expense of crossing the Channel would be for nothing. This, the thinking goes, would undermine the business model of the people-smuggling gangs, reducing the flood of small-boats arrivals to a trickle.

But as Macron’s state visit has progressed, a very different migration pact has emerged. As things stand, although the deal is yet to be finalised, instead of a ‘one in, one out’ system, France has seemingly managed to barter Britain down into accepting a ‘17 in, one out’ system. That’s because the current proposals envisage no more than 50 small-boats arrivals being sent back to France per week, even though 17 times that number are landing on the south coast. Indeed, hundreds arrived only this morning. Thanks to Starmer’s reverse-Midas touch, a proposal intended to stem the flow of migrants has resulted in a plan to take migrants off France’s hands, for nothing much in return.

No doubt Starmer and his team will protest that the migrants being invited under the scheme will need to have a ‘genuine reason to seek sanctuary in the UK’, as the BBC reports. But thanks to Britain’s activist judiciary, armed with the ECHR, that ‘genuine reason’ doesn’t have to mean fleeing tyranny, war or persecution. In recent months, asylum has been granted on the basis of having a speech impediment, having a son who dislikes foreign chicken nuggets and being a convicted paedophile. As things stand, and there is still much we don’t know, Starmer’s scheme amounts to an open invitation to virtually any would-be Channel migrant.

No one is surprised to see Starmer being stitched up like a kipper in this way. After all, this is the man who signed over Britain’s fishing rights to Brussels in exchange for some meetings about passport eGates. It’s the man who gave the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, and paid billions for the pleasure. It surely can’t be long until he gets out the chequebook to assist a kindly prince from Nigeria.

It would be tempting to put Starmer’s lack of negotiating nous down to pure incompetence – and no doubt there’s a lot of incompetence to go around in this Labour government. But the repeated betrayals and sellouts suggest not just an inability to stand up for the national interest – they also betray an indifference to the national interest, even a belief that there is no national interest at all. Indeed, if there is anything that defines this otherwise rudderless government and its hollow leader, it’s their obsession with adhering to international law, bowing and scraping to international institutions, and currying favour with international leaders. No matter the cost to British sovereignty or the taxpayer – and no matter how angry this makes the public.

Starmer keeps being sold pups because he’s an all too willing buyer.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.