It is a major blow for Starmer, who is under huge pressure to show results on tackling small boats after a summer of localized anti-migrant protests.
Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, which is leading Labour by 11 points in opinion polls, is amping up the pressure on the British prime minister over his asylum policy at a time when Starmer’s authority with his own party has been dented by the departure of three of his top team.
The political peril has not gone unnoticed in government. The court decision has gone down like a “bucket of sick,” one minister said.
Déjà vu
Starmer is not the first U.K. prime minister whose efforts to deter asylum-seekers arriving on small boats across the English Channel have been thwarted by the courts.
His Conservative predecessor Rishi Sunak, who staked his political career on a promise to “Stop the Boats,” was blocked from sending some people seeking asylum to Rwanda by the U.K. Supreme Court, which declared it was not a safe country.
In a bid to keep his deterrent policy alive, Sunak controversially legislated to declare Rwanda a safe country, and signed a new treaty with the East African nation — but the scheme was canceled by Starmer who claimed it was an expensive “gimmick.”