Prime Minister Keir Starmer has blamed Brexit for the surge in small boat crossings across the English Channel, which he labelled “Farage boats”. Speaking after the Labour Party conference, he signalled his intention to review how international law is interpreted by British courts in deportation cases, while defending the UK’s membership of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
Starmer told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the UK had lost the ability to return asylum seekers to EU member states under the Dublin convention after leaving the bloc. “These are Farage boats, in many senses, that are coming across the Channel,” he said. Home Office figures show more than 33,000 people have arrived via small boats so far this year, a record since data collection began in 2018.
The prime minister criticised Nigel Farage, saying the Reform UK leader had wrongly claimed Brexit would make no difference to immigration controls. “I would gently point out to Nigel Farage and others that before we left the EU, we had a returns agreement with every country in the EU and he told the country it would make no difference if we left. He was wrong about that,” Starmer told GB News.
Starmer said the government needed to “ramp up” a new returns agreement with France to send back migrants who cross the Channel, in exchange for accepting those with genuine asylum claims who have not attempted the crossing. He cited Articles 3 and 8 of the ECHR—which ban torture and protect private and family life—as areas where judicial interpretation was blocking deportations of foreign criminals.
In his conference speech, Starmer accused Farage of never having “liked or believed in Britain” and questioned whether Reform UK loved the country or sought to “stir the pot of division”. He later told Sky News that Reform’s policy to scrap indefinite leave to remain had made minorities feel a “shiver down their throat”. Farage denied the racism accusations and criticised Starmer for putting his activists at risk.
Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary, said Starmer had “shown real fightback” and “drawn a line” under recent leadership questions. However, Sonya Sceats of Freedom from Torture warned against “chipping away at Article 3 of the ECHR”.
