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Andrew Feinberg
White House Correspondent
Sir Keir Starmer has shown “great interest” in Italy’s controversial scheme to send migrants to be processed offshore, the country’s leader Giorgia Meloni has said.
A defiant Italian premier also defended her deal with Albania, brushing aside humanitarian concerns as “completely groundless”.
Sir Keir has not ruled out a similar scheme in the UK and said he would employ “British pragmatism” when it comes to solving the small boats crisis, after a summit with Ms Meloni in Rome.
The two met after another tragic weekend in which eight people died attempting to cross the English Channel.
Before the prime minister’s trip, No 10 praised Ms Meloni and said the pair would discuss her country’s success slashing boat crossings by 60 per cent over the past year.
As well as the yet-to-begin Albania scheme, the Italian PM has struck financial deals with countries including Tunisia and Libya in a bid to prevent small boats setting off from north Africa.
In the wake of the summit, the UK is expected to give some £4m to an initiative called the Rome Process, an Italian government scheme to tackle the root causes of irregular migration.
After their meeting, Ms Meloni told a press conference: "The UK government has shown great interest in this [Albania] agreement."
Earlier the home secretary Yvette Cooper defended the deal describing it as “very, very different” from Rishi Sunak’s widely condemned Rwanda plan.
Under the Conservatives’ scheme, which Labour scrapped immediately after taking power, asylum seekers would have been sent on a one-way ticket to the African nation, whether or not their asylum application was successful.
Under the Meloni plan, Albania will accept asylum seekers on Italy’s behalf while their claims are processed. Those whose claims are successful, expected to be a small minority, will be brought to Italy, while failed asylum seekers from safe countries will be returned to their home country.
But Steve Valdez-Symonds from Amnesty International said there should be “no question “of the UK doing deals to “offload its responsibilities onto other countries”.
“After the Conservative government’s shameful attempt at this, the last thing needed is yet another government pursuing schemes to avoid fulfilling the UK’s comparatively modest refugee obligations rather than showing some leadership and taking responsibility.”
Labour MP Diane Abbott described the Italian leader as a “literal fascist” and asked of her party leader: “What does he hope to learn from her?”
Another Labour MP Kim Johnson has described it as “disturbing that Starmer is seeking to learn lessons from a neo-fascist government – particularly after the anti-refugee riots and far-right racist terrorism that swept Britain this summer”.
Human Rights Watch has said the Albania deal breaches “fundamental tenets of rescue at sea and undermining asylum rights and freedom from arbitrary detention. It is also unlikely to deter people from making dangerous boat crossings.”
Ahead of his visit to Rome, Sir Keir said he was “interested” in the Albania deal.
Asked at the weekend if he would consider seeking a similar agreement, the prime minister said: “Let’s see. It’s early days. I’m interested in how that works, I think everybody else is. It’s very, very early days.”
During their joint press conference, he said: “We discussed the Albania arrangement, which is not up and running yet... therefore we don’t yet know the outcome of it.”
“But we discussed the concept of it, along with the prevention piece as well, because the numbers here, as I’ve said, have gone down quite significantly. That’s actually not attributable, of course, to the Albania scheme, because that hasn’t started.
“That, in my view, is more likely attributable to the work that the prime minister has done upstream... with some of the countries where migrants are coming from.”
He also told Ms Meloni she had made “remarkable progress working with countries along migration routes as equals to address the drivers of migration at source and to tackle the gangs”.
Pressed on whether Labour would consider such a scheme, Ms Cooper told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “It’s very, very different. So the arrangement that they have in place – and look, it’s not working yet, so we don’t know how it will play out – but it is a very, very different approach.”
She stressed that processing in Albania was done by Italian authorities and that there was international “oversight, so it is being monitored to make sure that it meets international standards”.
She said the Italians were using the scheme “as a way to try and fast-track decisions and returns”. She added: “Now we think there is another way we can fast-track decisions and returns for people who arrive from predominantly safer countries.
"We should be fast-tracking those cases. We should be making sure you don’t have people spending years in the asylum system, which ends up being hugely costly, hugely chaotic. That’s the system we’ve inherited."
The Conservatives have been accused of allowing a huge backlog of asylum seeker claims to pile up as ministers waited to deport them to Rwanda, despite no flights ever leaving the UK.
In an effort to boost trade, Italian companies are also set to make investments into the UK worth almost £500m.
The defence, aerospace and security company Leonardo is to invest £435m this year, to be spent at their Yeovil site and in technology development and research programmes across the UK, according to Downing Street. The commitment will fund 8,000 jobs.
Steel manufacturer Marcegaglia will invest £50m in Sheffield to build a new clean steel furnace, creating 50 new jobs.
Shadow home secretary James Cleverly MP said: “All we heard today from Starmer was more words in place of action. Meetings, press conferences, and roundtables won’t stop the people smugglers.“
He added: “The government still does not have a proper deterrent or somewhere to send failed asylum seekers we can’t send home. Without answers to either of these questions, vulnerable people will continue to die in the Channel.”
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