Shadow Transport Secretary Richard Holden has called for illegal migrants crossing the Channel to be “detained and deported within a week”, accusing the Government of producing “ridiculous documents” rather than taking tougher action to tackle illegal migration.
Speaking to GB News, Mr Holden criticised Home Office guidance on sexual consent for migrants, arguing that the Government should focus on removing people who have no right to remain in the UK.
“There’s quite clearly not going to be a solution by that,” he said. “We’ve got a very clear policy in this space. We’ve got to detain and deport within a week.”
Mr Holden said Conservative policy would involve leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, arguing this was necessary because the current system was failing to remove people with no right to be here.
“The truth is, we are not doing that. We cannot get people out of our country,” he said.
He also criticised the Government’s approach to dispersing asylum seekers around the country, recalling former immigration minister Robert Jenrick’s record of opening new asylum hotels under the previous Conservative government. “We don’t want to see people dispersed. We want to see people detained and deported,” Mr Holden said. “Within a week, people should be detained and deported if they’ve got no right to be in the UK. We shouldn’t be producing these ridiculous documents, telling people what should be blindly obvious to anybody.”
Turning to the Government’s plans for offshore processing, Mr Holden said it was returning to an approach similar to the Rwanda scheme previously pursued by the Conservatives, but argued the latest proposals did not go far enough.
“If you’ve got to deport people, you should send them back to the country of origin,” he said. “If those countries won’t take them and we can’t send them back for certain reasons, such as Iran or Afghanistan, then we need to have somewhere else to put them.”
He said the Government’s proposals represented “a step in the right direction” but were “nowhere near enough”. “The truth is, unless we get out of the ECHR, we are never going to solve this problem,” he said, pointing to reports of increasingly large boats making the crossing and of smugglers earning thousands of pounds a week from the trade.
“We’ve got to end people dying in the Channel,” he said. “We’re only going to do that by ensuring that we leave the ECHR, which is the only way you can actually do proper offshore processing as well.”
Mr Holden also criticised the Government’s “one-in, one-out” arrangement with France, under which some migrants are returned across the Channel while others are brought over legally in exchange, saying “these schemes need a lot more work”. He added that shadow attorney general Lord Wolfson had examined the issue in detail, and argued that the only way to fix illegal Channel crossings was for Britain to leave the ECHR, which he said had become a legal framework used to prevent the removal of people who should not be in the UK. He credited Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood with recognising the scale of the problem more readily than some Labour colleagues, but said she was not willing to back the real solution.
Mr Holden argued that Labour’s offshore processing plan differed fundamentally from the Conservatives’ Rwanda policy, since migrants processed overseas under Labour’s model could ultimately still enter Britain, whereas under the Conservative scheme they would have remained in the third country.
“Offshore processing is not the same as getting people out of the country and keeping them out,” he said. “Under our scheme they would stay in Rwanda, not come to the UK. So the danger here is that some of this is smoke and mirrors.”
He said the distinction mattered because allowing people who crossed the Channel illegally to ultimately remain in Britain risked creating a “pull factor” to attempt the crossing in the first place.
“If you come here illegally, I don’t think you should be able to stay. That’s a fundamental principle of where Conservative Party policy is,” he said.
“People trying to cross to the UK, come here illegally, are bypassing the same immigration system that anybody else in the world would have to come through to come and work and live here,” he said.
Mr Holden also criticised lawyers he believes are obstructing efforts to remove people with no right to remain in Britain, arguing the Government’s priority should instead be defending the country and its values rather than producing documents of the kind discussed earlier in the interview.
“There’s loads of these leftie lawyers who just aren’t interested in what the real rules should be,” he said.
He concluded by reiterating his call for faster removals, arguing that Britain needed to prevent illegal crossings while tackling the criminal gangs profiting from them.
“We have to get to a position where we detain and deport quickly anybody who comes across the Channel,” he said.
