- Keir Starmer and shadow cabinet minister Jon Ashworth criticised the Tories handling of asylum seekers, particularly from countries like Bangladesh.
- They say that Labour aims to streamline processing and repatriate ineligible migrants.
Keir Starmer, the leader of the UK’s Labour Party, has asserted that Bangladeshi migrants, among others, are not being deported from the UK.
Starmer appears to be courting the far-right segment of the nation’s electorate.
In an interview with The Sun on Monday, Starmer remarked:
“At the moment, people coming from countries like Bangladesh are not being removed, because they’re not being processed.”
His assertions were subsequently supported by shadow cabinet minister Jon Ashworth, who lamented that “people coming here from the Indian subcontinent do not get returned.”
Starmer pledged that under a Labour government, a border security command equipped with counter terrorism powers would be established to “stop people coming here in the first place.” He declared, “I’ll make sure we’ve got planes going off – not to Rwanda, because that’s an expensive gimmick. They will go back to the countries where people come from. That’s what used to happen.”
On the same day, shadow paymaster general Ashworth told the BBC that a Labour government would repatriate migrants “from countries like Bangladesh or wherever” to their countries of origin. Ashworth, who has represented Leicester, Britain’s most multicultural city, since 2011, contended that “people coming here from the Indian subcontinent do not get returned. They get put up in hotels and they can stay in these hotels for the rest of their lives. That’s the Tory policy.”
“In fact,” he added, “the Conservative government’s policy is that the use of hotels for asylum seekers is a short-term measure to accommodate people who would otherwise be destitute.” While there is no evidence that asylum seekers can stay in hotels indefinitely at taxpayers’ expense, many have been residing in hotels for over a year due to a backlog of asylum applications. “We’re gonna send people back,” Ashworth reiterated in his BBC interview. “We’re gonna process people’s claims, and we’re gonna get on with processing people’s claims, and those people that shouldn’t be here when they come from countries like Bangladesh or wherever, we’re gonna send them back.”
Ashworth was queried on whether the UK would be able to negotiate return agreements with the Taliban and the Iranian government, given that a significant proportion of asylum seekers in Britain originate from Afghanistan and Iran. “The Taliban and Afghanistan is a different set-up,” Ashworth responded, but he did not exclude the possibility of repatriating asylum seekers from Afghanistan and Iran. “A big proportion is India, Bangladesh, Albania. We need to deal with those countries.”
Ashworth is the incumbent parliamentary candidate in Leicester South, where approximately 30 percent of the population, over 30,000 people, are Muslim, and around 39 percent of the constituency’s residents are ethnically white. Labour has pledged to reduce net migration, enhance border security by preventing asylum seekers from arriving in small boats, and expedite removals to safe countries.
