Sir Keir Starmer in Albania to tackle 'revolving door' of migration
In the first official visit to the country by a UK prime minister, he hopes to reinforce this week's tough message about slashing levels of both legal and illegal migration.
Sir Keir is relying on "smashing the gangs" as the government's policy to tackle small boat crossings, which remain at a record high this year; passing the 10,000 mark last month.
But working with officials in Albania is seen as a success story in stopping migration at source, partly due to the actions of the previous Conservative government which Sir Keir will build on.
In 2022, arrivals from Albania accounted for around a third of all small boat arrivals - a higher number than from any other country.
Over the past three years, those numbers have been cut by 95%. The number of Albanians returned to their home country has also more than doubled to 5,294 last year, from just over 2,000 two years' earlier.
The prime minister will join Edi Rama, prime minister of Albania since 2013, at the Port of Durres on Thursday to see UK-backed efforts to tackle smuggling gangs and the criminal activities that fund them.
A programme to detect migrants attempting to travel using fake or stolen documents will be expanded, with the UK donating new anti- forgery machines. The government will also invest a further £1m in DNA technology to detect serious criminals on the streets of the UK.
Sir Keir is also expected to express concerns about a "revolving door effect" in which a migrant is returned home, only to evade law enforcement and leave the country again. He will support programmes in northern Albania - where migrants come from - to reintegrate young people and provide them with employment opportunities, the government said.
The prime minister will announce that the joint migration taskforce, with Albania and Kosovo, signed at the end of 2022, will be expanded to include North Macedonia and Montenegro.
The National Crime Agency will share intelligence with law enforcement agencies in these countries and deploy UK funded drones to detect gangsters funnelling migrants through the Western Balkans corridor and on to the UK.
The countries of the Western Balkans - including Serbia, whose government signed an agreement with Sir Keir last year - have for around five years been the key corridor to Europe for migrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
Sir Keir will say: "Global challenges need shared solutions, and the work the UK and Albania are doing together is delivering security for working people in both countries.
"Our joint work to deter, detect and return illegal migrants is further proof that intervening upstream to protect British shores and secure our borders is the right approach.
"Every step we take to tackle illegal migration overseas, cripple the criminal networks that facilitate it and stem the finance streams that fund it is delivering safer streets in the UK, and reducing the strain on taxpayer funded services."
On Friday the prime minister will attend the European Political Community summit in the capital Tirana, a forum for European leaders to discuss security challenges in the wake of the war in Ukraine.
It's expected to be a chance for the UK to discuss key points of a forthcoming defence pact with the EU and the terms of a "reset" of relations ahead of a summit in London next Monday.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Telegraph
30 minutes ago
- Telegraph
The threat to gay rights comes from trans extremism, not Reform or Trump
Russell T. Davies, one Britain's most celebrated television screenwriters, has a new script – a paranoid, progressive potboiler in which human rights teeter on the brink. In an interview with Big Issue, the Queer as Folk creator and Dr Who lead writer warned that 'things are rapidly and urgently getting worse' for gay people. At home, Reform is gaining support; abroad, President Trump – who danced to Y.M.C.A. at his election rallies – 'would be happier with us invisible and gone… if not biologically altered to become as straight as him.' This, apparently, is the hostile climate that demanded he write Tip Toe – a drama, by his own admission, 'literally no one asked for.' Davies seems unaware that in the UK, gay and bisexual people already have every right worth having – we can marry, serve in the army, adopt, and bore each other senseless about mortgages, just like anyone else. Any threat to those hard-won freedoms now comes not from the state, but from the overreach of activists like Davies himself, and the forced yoking of the LGB to the T – causes that pull in opposite directions. If the Right is gaining ground, it's because the public has grown sick of being bullied into denying biological reality. It's not Reform UK that alienated ordinary parents; it's Stonewall-trained teachers telling six-year-olds they might be born in the wrong body. It's not Nigel Farage who united radical feminists and renegade vicars; it's activists trying to strip away our language, our spaces and our sexual boundaries. Indeed, Reform's promise to 'ban transgender ideology' in schools could shield the next generation from the fiction of being 'born in the wrong body' – a lie that disproportionately ensnares children who will grow up to be same-sex attracted. In this, the party has done more to safeguard gay rights than Davies. The trans lobby has spent the last decade dismantling the definition of homosexuality. Stonewall's former boss, Nancy Kelley, even smeared lesbians who refuse male 'lesbian' partners as 'sexual racists.' The Right has stepped into the void left by progressives, and who can blame them? Yet Davies yearns for the 'anger of the past' and warns of a coming fight. 'They're out to get us,' he says of the US right. 'The whole world is keeping all of us awake… I hope [the younger generation] are prepared to fight… because a fight is coming.' On that, at least, he's half right – a fight is coming. But it's not against imaginary armies of 1950s-style homophobes. It's against an ideology that makes homosexuality unspeakable by erasing the reality of sex. And if the scenes continue to be written by men like Davies, there is a risk that the hard-fought rights of LGB people could be swept away by the justified tide of fury about the excesses of trans activism. If Davies truly wants to defend gay rights, he should stand for the right of same-sex attracted people to exist on our own terms. Otherwise, the bleak finale he fears will be one he co-wrote – and this time there'll be no option to rewind and reset when the credits roll.
Telegraph
30 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Let's not rewrite history: Nicola Sturgeon was a truly dire politician
Isn't it time to put the legend of 'Sturgeon the Magnificent' back in its box as we await publication on Thursday of her book Frankly. She's having a rare old time, much better than she'd ever achieved when she was something… you know like First Minister of Scotland. Leaving aside all that gender stuff which she got completely wrong right from the start and which proved to even her most ardent fans that she was, well, nuts in thinking that a woman with a penis guilty of rape should go to a woman's prison. Oh yes, and there was that other stuff which some people might remember such as the battle she and her former mentor turned deadly enemy, Alex Salmond, fought over who was conspiring against whom about claims of sexual assaults against staff. Yet, still the idea seems to have grown legs that she was some kind of wonderful politician – a veritable genius who showed that even when in charge of a country with only five million souls doing the right thing by those people gets you a place on the international stage. The trouble is that Sturgeon seldom did the right thing. Her reputation has grown like Topsy even before her book was even written, never mind published. So much so that she was compared in the S unday Times magazine as 'Britain's most successful female politician since Margaret Thatcher'. I'm bound to confess that I had to read that more than a few times… but on each occasion I concluded that this was a nonsense verdict with no basis in fact as history has shown and is still showing. The plain fact is that Nicola Sturgeon was an extremely poor politician. Oh yes, she was a pretty good debater, well able to best many of her opponents, and was a more than decent public speaker, if you like your tub to be thumped. However, there's a whole host of Glasgow University graduates – as she is – including two ex-prime ministers and several very able MPs, a famous journalist and – I didn't know this – an Archbishop of Canterbury who could claim those attributes. But to be a good politician requires more than debating and speaking skills. Judgment is what's required, specifically about policies and on these she was nigh-on useless. Think of the gender row she began and continues to fight; of the stupid coalition deal she struck with the Marxist Greens; of the plan to ban all new North Sea oil and gas development; of the multi-million pound ferries debacle; of the record drug deaths; of poorest kids failing in schools; her total shut down policy during the Covid pandemic. All of these issues and others brought the SNP to its knees in last year's election and her current successor spends most of his time trying to undo the damage she caused. She'd retired by then but she nearly killed her party in absentia. Given all these failures, how is it that a book she's written is getting pretty fair and positive licks in the media. How come? One reason for this adulation is that she long ago completely conned a large part of the Fleet Street commentariat. She knew they wouldn't know all the details of her stuff and wouldn't bother trying to find out, either, and so she skated through their questions with a smile on her face. They admired her then and still do because she launched a determined and successful campaign to court them. She was all over them like a cheap suit when there was a press conference attended by London journalists. They hung on her every word and one has even asked her about her tattoo. I've known her for longer than most – for a quarter of a century in fact. A colleague and myself helped her and Peter Murrell, her estranged husband, celebrate their marriage with a bottle of champagne in a Perth restaurant several years ago. She has many good qualities… a wicked sense of humour among them and she also knows her way around a wine list, displaying much better taste than Alex Salmond. However, it's her gallus nature – Scots for chutzpah – much more than political judgment that's got her to where she is today.
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
Ukraine prepared to cede territory held by Russia
Ukraine could agree to stop fighting and cede territory already held by Russia as part of a European-backed plan for peace. Volodymyr Zelensky told European leaders that they must reject any settlement proposed by Donald Trump which sees them giving up Ukrainian land they still hold - but that Ukrainian territory in Russia's control could be on the table. This would mean freezing the frontline where it is and handing Russia de-facto control of the territory it occupies in Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Crimea. The softening of the negotiating position comes ahead of crunch talks between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska this Friday. 'The plan can only be related to the current positions held by the militaries,' a Western official said, characterising a frantic weekend of diplomacy between Kyiv and its allies. Ukraine and Europe have become increasingly concerned that Mr Trump and Putin could negotiate an end to the long-running war over Mr Zelensky's head. 'I have many fears and a lot of hope,' Poland's prime minister said on Monday.
