LONDON: Britain's new Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Saturday said he was "not prepared" to continue with the previous Conservative government's flagship scheme to deport migrants to Rwanda.
"The Rwanda scheme was dead and buried before it started... I'm not prepared to continue with gimmicks that don't act as a deterrent," he told reporters at his first news conference.
Ex-prime minister Rishi Sunak has staked his political reputation on his plan to "stop the boats", pushing the controversial deportation plan despite opposition from rights groups and judicial rulings.
Labour, however, said it would jettison the scheme to remove people to Rwanda who crossed the English Channel by boat from northern France.
Immigration has become an increasingly central political issue since the United Kingdom left the European Union in 2020, largely on a promise to "take back control" of the country's borders.
He has pledged to tackle the issue "upstream" by smashing the people-smuggling gangs behind the crossings.
Central to the policy would be a new "elite" Border Security Command, comprising immigration and law enforcement specialists, as well as the domestic intelligence service MI5, he has said.
An estimated 12,313 people have made the crossing to Britain so far this year, an 18 per cent increase from the same period last year, the UK Home Office said last month.
There were 29,437 arrivals across the whole of 2023, a drop of 36 per cent on a record 45,774 arrivals in 2022.
The Labour leader told his top team, including Britain's first woman finance minister Rachel Reeves and new foreign minister David Lammy, it had been "the honour and the privilege of my life" to be invited by King Charles III to form the government.
"We have a huge amount of work to do, so now we get on with our work," he said to applause and smiles around the cabinet table.
Starmer spent his first hours in Downing Street on Friday appointing his ministerial team, hours after securing his centre-left party's return to power with a whopping 174-seat majority in the UK parliament. Notable lower-ranking appointments included Patrick Vallance, chief scientific government adviser during the Covid-19 pandemic, who has been made a science minister.
James Timpson, whose shoe repair company employs ex-offenders, was also made a prisons minister. — AFP
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