University of Birmingham

So Labour has dropped the Rwanda Plan, which is good news. The policy change was pledged during the election campaign and swiftly implemented in the first week in office.

Huge amounts of public funding have been wasted over the past two years since the plan was announced. Only one person was sent to Rwanda on a voluntary basis with a £3,000 cheque – a really small fee considering that, according to the figures released to the National Audit Office, the overall cost of the scheme stands at more than half-a-billion pounds. There is a ‘five-year processing and integration package’ for each relocated person costing up to £150,874 for each deported person.

Opposition to the Rwanda scheme has come from many sides and for a range of reasons, human rights being one of them. But logistical and financial considerations, as the figures above show, have also had a significant impact on its feasibility. Logistically, it was striking the distance between what the government claimed to achieve with the Rwanda plan, removing all migrants who had crossed irregularly into the UK within a given time window (the exact terms changed in its various iterations), and the reality of Rwanda offering to host only a few hundred people at any one time.

Even the so-called deterrence approach that the Tory government was so keen to claim, proved hard to achieve, with the figures of arrivals fluctuating driven by several factors, and difficult to pin down to the ‘deterrence effect’. As a result, well founded scepticism about the plan spread among the British public, making it easier for Labour to drop it.

However, this doesn’t mean that irregular crossings are no longer a problem for the public. Right-wing media will not let the issue drop, as it remains one of the few weapons in their populist arsenal at present. This is why Labour had come up with an alternative strategy: ‘smash the gangs’ to ‘stop the boats’. It doesn’t sound very new, does it? Well, because it isn’t.

What they are proposing is the creation of a centralised commander in charge of anti-smuggling and anti-trafficking operations in collaboration with our European partners. A similar operational command was created by Priti Patel and Boris Johnson only a couple of years ago and had operated also under Rishi Sunak. In truth, some of the previous Government’s successes in containing irregular arrivals had come from this policy rather than the Rwanda Plan. But, again, the point about migration governance and control is that it is not only about migration. For the very same reasons Sunak, Patel, Johnson and Braverman could not boast about limited success in reducing irregular crossings thanks to the cooperation with our closest neighbours in Europe as it would have undermined a pillar of their political legitimacy – that is to say Brexit and ‘taking back control’.

Conversely, a more pro-EU Labour government is likely to use migration and the fight against smugglers as a trojan horse to reopen the discussion - among those supporting Brexit - on how essential a close cooperation with the EU to take back control of our borders. It is, therefore, no surprise that David Lammy travelled to the EU within hours of his appointments as Foreign Secretary, that a Cabinet minister was appointed for constitutional affairs and European relations and that the Home Secretary mentioned cooperation with France and other EU partners several times when doing her first round of media interviews on migration control.

But there is more to the Rwanda Plan than meets the eyes. The removal scheme was part of a wider strategy by the UK government to reconnect with Commonwealth partners and establish close economic and political ties. It is no coincidence that just a few weeks after announcing the Plan, Rwanda hosted the heads of state of the Commonwealth with grand fanfare. So what will the Labour government do with this side of the Rwanda Plan? Will we see a shift back to a more developmental approach to how the country retains or builds its influence in the world, or will Labour continue to pursue a more trade-driven, transaction approach to foreign policy as we have seen in the last few years in the pursuit of ‘Global Britain’?

To open opportunities for new policy approaches on migration we need a new narrative on migration. For now, we are seeing more of the same. In some cases this is a matter of convenience, as it may serve the pro-EU realignment we are likely to see in the coming years; in other instances our new Government does not have full control of the narrative and must - at least to some extent – continue dancing to the same tune.