Keir Starmer says scrapping UK’s Rwanda migrant deportation plan

Previous Conservative government’s policy was ‘never a deterrent’, new PM says, calling it ‘dead and buried’.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer says he will not continue with the previous Conservative government’s policy to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.

“The Rwanda scheme was dead and buried before it started. It’s never been a deterrent,” Starmer told his first news conference on Saturday, after his Labour Party won a landslide in the general election.

“I’m not prepared to continue with gimmicks that don’t act as a deterrent,” he told reporters after a cabinet meeting, describing the plan as a “problem that we are inheriting”.

The contentious law was approved in April by parliament, which declared Rwanda to be a safe third country, bypassing an earlier UK Supreme Court ruling that said the scheme was unlawful on human rights grounds.

The authorities started detaining asylum seekers in May.

Then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who promised to stop migrants and asylum seekers arriving on small boats from mainland Europe, had pushed for the policy.

And when faced with opposition in parliament, Sunak said in April: “No ifs, no buts. These flights are going to Rwanda.”

Tens of thousands of asylum seekers – many fleeing wars and poverty in Africa, the Middle East and Asia – have reached Britain in recent years by crossing the English Channel in small boats on risky journeys organised by people-smuggling gangs.

During his Saturday news conference, Starmer said the Rwanda scheme was widely expected to fail.

“Everybody has worked out, particularly the gangs that run this, that the chance of ever going to Rwanda was so slim, less than 1 percent, that it was never a deterrent and the chances were not going, and not being processed and staying here … in paid-for accommodation for a very, very long time,” he told reporters.