Boris Johnson criticises Keir Starmer for turning Britain into ‘Orwellian nightmare’ | Politics | News

Boris Johnson has accused Sir Keir Starmer of “changing the language” around the small boat crisis to cover up his own inaction on the issue, suggesting Britain is sliding into an Orwellian nightmare.

In an article for The Daily Mail, the former Prime Minister claimed that the current government has decided it is “no longer acceptable” to highlight the plague of criminal gangs organising the dangerous journeys across the Channel to Britain.

“Instead of deterring the gangs, Labour has announced an amnesty for 100,000 people who were due to be deported so they can now claim asylum in the UK and inevitably live here,” he claimed.

“Instead of tackling the problem, they seem to be changing the language we use to talk about it. We should stop calling cross-Channel traffic ‘illegal’ migration and just ‘irregular’ migration,” he added.

Johnson, 60, praised the generosity the UK has shown in recent years to people fleeing Hong Kong, Afghanistan and Ukraine, but said Labour’s language lumped them in with lawbreakers.

“It is a moral and political disaster because it will obviously only lead to arbitrary prejudice against all immigrants, legal or otherwise,” he argued.

“It is also a misuse of language. You might as well say that shoplifters are no longer guilty of theft but of ‘irregular’ shopping and that drunk drivers are guilty of ‘irregular’ driving.”

However, the term had already been used by Johnson’s own government, when former Immigration Minister Chris Philp pushed in parliament in 2019 for changes to immigration rules, saying they were “essential to curbing illegal migration”.

Meanwhile, Sir Keir has repeatedly referred to illegal migration in connection with the border crossings, including at the European Political Community summit in July.

Mr Johnson also said the Rwanda programme, which would see people identified by the UK as illegal immigrants or asylum seekers transferred to the East African country for processing, asylum and resettlement, “would undoubtedly have worked” if government policy had remained the same.

The plan, brought forward by the former Conservative government, was condemned by human rights groups and declared unlawful by the High Court.

In response, the then government introduced a bill to establish in British law that Rwanda is a safe country. The legislation provided that the courts could ignore important parts of the Human Rights Act and other British laws or international rules.

The measure was scrapped after Labour came to power in July, before any flights had taken place. Sir Keir said his government would tackle the problem by “breaking up” people-smuggling gangs behind the border crossings.