Rwanda migrant plan ‘dead and buried’: new UK PM

Newly elected UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer began his first full day in charge yesterday by declaring the ousted Tories’ plan to deport migrants to Rwanda “dead and buried” and pledging growth as his government’s “number one mission”.
On Friday the Labour leader won a landslide election victory, bringing to a close 14 years of Conservative rule.
He said he was “restless for change” and that his party had received a “mandate to do politics differently”.
Starmer started the day with a first meeting of his cabinet including Britain’s first woman finance minister, Rachel Reeves, and new foreign minister, David Lammy.
“We have a huge amount of work to do, so now we get on with our work,” he told his top team to applause and smiles around the cabinet table.
At a news conference afterwards he said he would not be proceeding with former Conservative prime minister Rishi Sunak’s controversial scheme to tackle rising small boat arrivals on England’s southern coast by deporting migrants to Rwanda.
“The Rwanda scheme was dead and buried before it started ... I’m not prepared to continue with gimmicks that don’t act as a deterrent,” he told reporters at his 10 Downing Street office.
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 that it would put an end to asylum-seekers arriving on small boats.
However, no one was sent to Rwanda under the plan because of years of legal challenges.
Starmer spent his first hours in Downing Street on Friday appointing his ministerial team, hours after securing his centre-left party’s return to power with a whopping 174-seat majority in the UK parliament.
Notable lower-ranking appointments included Patrick Vallance, chief scientific government adviser during the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, who has been made a science minister.
James Timpson, whose shoe repair company employs ex-offenders, was also made a prisons minister.
Starmer said both new ministers were people “associated with change” and illustrated his determination to deliver concrete improvements to people’s lives.
Work on “driving growth” had already begun, he said, adding that he had told his ministers “exactly what I expect of them in terms of standards, delivery, and the trust that the country has put in them”.
Flag-waving crowds of cheering Labour activists on Friday welcomed Starmer to Downing Street hours after his victory.
However, daunting challenges await his government, including a stagnating economy, creaking public services and households suffering from a years-long cost-of-living crisis.
World leaders lined up to congratulate the new British premier.
Starmer spoke by telephone with US President Joe Biden and “discussed their shared commitment to the special relationship between the UK and US and their aligned ambitions for greater economic growth”, according to London.
He also spoke to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
However, former – and potentially future – US president Donald Trump ignored Starmer, instead hailing the five-seat electoral breakthrough of his ally Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK party.
Starmer will make his debut on the international stage as leader when he flies to Washington next week for a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) summit.
“It is for me to be absolutely clear that the first duty of my government is security and defence, to make clear our unshakable support of Nato,” he said.
He added that he had reiterated the support of the UK and its allies for Ukraine to Zelensky.
The election saw Labour near its record of 418 seats under ex-leader Tony Blair in 1997 by winning 412.
The Conservatives suffered their worst-ever defeat, capturing just 121 constituencies, prompting Sunak to apologise to the nation and confirm that he will resign as Tory leader once arrangements are in place to select a successor.
A record 12 senior government ministers lost their seats, alongside former prime minister Liz Truss, whose economically calamitous short-lived tenure in 2022 wounded the party irreparably ahead of the election.
It is now poised for another period of infighting between a moderate wing eager for a centrist leader and those who may even be willing to court Farage as a new figurehead.
The election also saw the centrist Liberal Democrats make their biggest gains in around a century, claiming more than 70 seats.
However, it was a dismal contest for the pro-independence Scottish National Party, which was virtually obliterated in Scotland. It dropped from 48 seats to just nine.
The Green Party had its best general election, quadrupling its MPs count to four.
Meanwhile, an unprecedented six independent lawmakers were elected – four of them defeating Labour candidates in districts with large Muslim populations and campaigns centred around the Israel-Hamas conflict.
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.
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.
“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.