Starmer defends Italy trip, citing ‘dramatic reductions’ in unlawful migration – UK politics live | Politics

Keir Starmer says it is “fantastic” to be here, and he praises the weather and the venue.

He has come “for a very simple reason”, he says. He recognises Italy “as a leader in Europe, on the world stage, as a G7 economy and a Nato ally”, he says.

He says he is particularly grateful to Meloni for her leadership on Ukraine. (She has been robustly anti-Russian, unlike some other European politicians leading far-right parties.)

On irregular migration, he says this is a challenge for all of Eurpoe. As DPP, he saw what could be done by cross-border cooperation. He says he has never accepted the people smuggling gangs could not be tackled in the way terrorist gangs were. He goes on:

And now, of course, Italy has shown that we can. You’ve made remarkable progress working with countries along migration routes as equals to address the drivers of migration, of source and to tackle the gangs.

Starmer says he and Meloni also discussed two new Italian investment announcements in the UK.

Meloni says she and Starmer also discussed investment opportunities.

And she says they discussed Ukraine and the Middle East.

She says this will just be the first of a long series of meetings.

Giorgia Meloni, the Italian PM, is speaking at the opening of the press conference with Keir Starmer.

She is running through what she and Starmer discussed. They agreed to beef up efforts to tackle the gangs involved in people smuggling, she says.

These are from the i’s Chloe Chaplain.

The press conference in Rome with Keir Starmer and his Italian counterpart, Giorgia Meloni, is starting very soon, we’re told.

At the Lib Dem conference the hall may have been very full for Daisy Cooper’s speech this morning (see 12.46pm), but one person who apparently was not there was the party leader, Ed Davey. According to PA Media, he left the conference this morning to help replace a stile in Ditchling village with a group of volunteers called the Monday Group. The organisation helps to helps maintain footpaths in Sussex.

Back to the Liberal Democrats, and this is from my colleague Peter Walker, who was in the hall for Daisy Cooper’s speech (see 11.55am) – along with a surprisingly large number of other people, he points out.

Here are some pictures from Keir Starmer’s meeting with his Italian counterpart, Giorgia Meloni, at the Villa Doria Pamphilj in Rome. They seem to be geting on pretty well.

Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has been urged by leading economists to loosen the government’s fiscal rules to allow more public investment.

In a letter published in the Financial Times, they say that Labour will fail to bring in the “decade of national renewal” it has promised if it sticks to the spending plans it has inherited, implying cuts to investment.

The signatories include Gus O’Donnell, a former cabinet secretary, and Jim O’Neill, the former Goldman Sachs economist who served as a Treasury minister under David Cameron.

The letter says:

The challenge of renewing Britain requires the rebuilding of crumbling public services while also investing in the clean infrastructure needed to meet our climate targets and create an economy that is more resilient in the future. This challenge cannot be met by the private sector alone, it requires a step change in levels of public investment.

Yet the government has inherited spending plans that imply substantial real-terms cuts in public investment over the current parliament. We do not see how the planned “decade of national renewal” can take place if these cuts are delivered. To follow through on these plans would be to repeat the mistakes of the past, where investment cuts made in the name of fiscal prudence have damaged the foundations of the economy and undermined the UK’s long-term fiscal sustainability.

The current fiscal framework has helped to drive this short-term thinking and created an inbuilt bias against investment. A more responsible approach, which better reflects the significant long-term benefits of increased public investment, will require changes to our fiscal rules and to the mandate for the Office for Budget Responsibility.

In the upcoming budget it is essential that the government recognises the important role that public investment must play in the decade of national renewal. Further cuts to public investment must be avoided, a strategy for substantially increasing public investment adopted, and a process initiated to implement a pro-investment fiscal framework that focuses on long-term fiscal sustainability.

The letter was also signed by Prof Mariana Mazzucato from University College, London; Mohamed El-Erian, president of Queen’s College Cambridge; Sir Anton Muscatelli, principal of Glasgow university; Prof Simon Wren-Lewis, of Oxford university; Prof Jonathan Portes of King’s College London; and Prof Susan Newman of the Open University.

Labour has two main fiscal rules: that day-to-day spending costs should match revenue, and that debt should be falling as a proportion of GDP by the fifth year of the forecast. These are much the same as the old Tory rules, but Reeves has changed the balanced budget rule so that it does not include investment spending.

However, her scope to increase investment is still heavily constrained by the debt rule.

Reeves repeatedly stresses the importance of fiscal responsibility, and sticking to the rules, but there has been speculation that she could give herself some extra room for manoeuvre when she sets out the exact details of how the rules are defined at the budget.

There is nothing that Labour is more proud of than being the party that set up the NHS. But, in her speech to the Liberal Democrat conference this morning, Daisy Cooper, the Lib Dem deputy leader and health spokesperson argued that the NHS was a liberal idea – because it delivers freedom (from the effects of ill health) and because it was based on ideas in the wartime Beveridge report, and William Beveridge was a liberal.

At the election the Lib Dems put a £9bn health and social care plan at the heart of its manifesto.

Cooper told her party:

As liberals, we don’t blindly defend the NHS as an institution. We defend it because it’s the manifestation of an idea – a liberal idea – that our NHS should be free at the point of use, and based on need not ability to pay. And we campaign for it – because health is about individual freedom.

You don’t have freedom, if you’re on a waiting list so long that your world shrinks and you’re left hobbling at home from one room to the next. You don’t have freedom if you’re diagnosed with cancer, but you have no start date for your treatment. You don’t have freedom, if you’re ready to leave hospital and go home, but you’re discharged instead to a care home miles away – losing mobility, independence and connection – for the sole reason that there aren’t the care workers to help you recover at home.

Conference, decent health and care services are the bedrock of a liberal society. That’s why we put health and care, front and centre of our general election campaign. It’s why our MPs have been raising questions about their local health services in parliament – en masse. And it’s why we’re demanding that the government make the autumn budget a budget to save the NHS and care …

We have a message for the Labour government too. The NHS was a liberal idea, driven forward by Labour. Designed by Beveridge, delivered by Bevan. So Wes [Streeting, health secretary] if you’re listening – Take up our ideas or put forward your own. If we support them, we’ll back you. But if we don’t see the right level of ambition or urgency, we will hold your feet to the fire.

Cooper said that this cause was personal to her because 12 years ago, suffering from aggressive Crohn’s disease, she was rushed to hospital and told that without surgery she had just four days to live. She said she recovered, but she worried what would happen to someone in a similar predicament now.

I was really scared. And I often wonder what’s happening now to the young woman – or man – who is suffering those same symptoms now. Can they even get an appointment with their GP?

At a briefing for journalists in Italy travelling with the PM, a Downing Street spokesperson was asked if the prime minister was worried about the Italian approach to irregular migration resulting in migrants being mistreated in countries like Tunisia. (See 10.13am.) She replied:

Obviously we take that incredibly seriously and want to be working more closely with countries upstream.

The principles that we’ll be following in everything that we do is that it is workable, affordable and in line with international humanitarian law.

But it is vital that we stop people from starting these journeys, we’ve seen far too many deaths in the Mediterranean as well as the Channel.

So it’s incumbent on us to take an international approach to an international challenge, to stop more lives being lost at sea, not just from the Channel, but also in the Mediterranean.

She also confirmed that the government is not planning to introduce any further “safe and legal” routes for asylum seekers wanting to come to the UK. A number of these routes already exist, she said.

Here are more pictures from Keir Starmer’s visit to the border controls centre in Rome.

In his clip for broadcasters, Keir Starmer was also asked about the revelation in the Sunday Times yesterday that Waheed Alli, a Labour donor, paid for clothes for Starmer’s wife, and that the gifts were declared late in the register of MPs’ interests.

Asked what he would say to people who felt the Starmers should be paying for their own clothes, and who felt he was now acting like Tory ministers he used to criticise, Starmer replied:

Let me shed a bit of light on this.

It’s very important to me that the rules are followed. I’ve always said that. I said that before the election, I’ve reinforced it after the election.

And that’s why, shortly after the election, my team reached out for advice on what declaration should be made so it’s in accordance with the rules.

They then sought out for further advice more recently, as a result of which they made the relevant declarations.

But for me it’s really important that the rules are followed. That’s why I was very pleased my team reached out proactively, not once but twice, because it is very important that we have transparency, very important that you and others can see the rules are being followed.

Starmer did not addresss the point about whether the Starmers should be paying for their own clothes.

In a Sunday Times report yesterday Gabriel Pogrund said that Starmer had declared clothes and glasses he had received from Alli, a peer and longstanding Labour donor, but that originally he had not declared clothing donations for his wife because his staff thought they did not need to be included in the register of members’ interests. Pogrund said, after his team checked the rules last week, these gifts were added.

The current register, which dates from two weeks ago and does not include the update, says Alli gave Starmer work clothes worth £16,200 and multiple glasses worth £2,485 earlier this year.

In an interview yesterday David Lammy, the foreign secretary, said that it was important for the PM and his wife to look smart when they are representing their country, and he claimed that in the US the president gets an allowance that covers this sort of expense.

Keir Starmer has defended going to Italy to learn about its approach to stopping irregular migration, saying he has long called for more focus on “upstream work” – stopping migrants setting off in the first place.

In a clip for broadcasters, he said:

I’m here to have discussions, here at this co-ordination centre and with the prime minister [Giorgia Meloni], about how we deal with unlawful migration.

Here there’s been some quite dramatic reductions. So I want to understand how that came about.

It looks as though that’s down to the upstream work that’s been done in some of the countries where people are coming from.

I’ve long believed, by the way, that prevention and stopping people travelling in the first place is one of the best ways to deal with this particular issue.

So I am very interested to know how that upstream work went, looking, of course, at other schemes, looking forward to my bilateral with the prime minister this afternoon, but we’ve already got a shared intent to work together on this trade, this vile trade, of pushing people across borders.

In her interview on the Today programme this morning, Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, was asked again whether Labour should be trying to learn anything about tackling migration from the Italian government. The presenter, Nick Robinson, pointed out that the Italian deputy PM, Matteo Salvini, is being prosecuted because he refused to let a migrant boat dock five years ago.

When it was put to her that Labour should have nothing to learn from this sort of approach, Cooper replied:

We have very different arrangements in the channel. There is very close cooperation between the UK and French authorities, including with organisations like the RNLI and the French different rescue authorities that work to make sure that everything possible is done to save lives.

But Robinson put it to her that maybe Italy’s approach was only successful because it involved hardline tactics that Labour would not be willing to follow. He quoted Tony Smith, a former head of the UK’s Border Force, who says this in an article for the Telegraph published yesterday.

Italy has also supplied patrol vessels to enable the Tunisian coastguard to pick up migrants who set off in the Mediterranean and return them there, well before they enter international or Italian waters.

Meanwhile, Italy and the EU have for years been paying Libya to clamp down on migrant boats; it is not just a Meloni initiative …

So, it’s going to be hard for the UK to use Italy’s success as a model for stopping the boats. Not least because it involves a raft of human rights violations and accords with pretty unpalatable countries – Libya is a failed state; and Tunisia is slipping back to autocracy.

In response, Cooper did not accept the premise of the question. She said the UK government would “always ensure that proper standards are met”. But she said that there had not been enough European cooperation to tackle the problem, and she said there had to be more focus on tackling organised crime. Referring to the Tories, she said:

I think there was just a bit too much just shouting from the last Conservative government. They shouted, but they didn’t do things. They shouted at other countries rather than working with them.

Keir Starmer has had a breakfast meeting with business leaders in Rome this morning. He told them the UK and Italy were “very close allies, obviously partners in the G7, partners in Nato, very strong bilateral relations”. He said his government’s top priority was growth. And, according to the PA Media report, he also had a message that may have been aimed more at the audience at home.

You will be familiar with this in your businesses, if you’re turning around business, if you’re turning around the company, and you know there are difficult decisions to make, it’s better to do them early on.

That’s a comment about next month’s budget.

Good morning. Rishi Sunak had a good relationship with Giorgia Meloni, the leader of a far-right party who became PM in Italy around the same time he did in the UK, and he took a very close interest in what her government is doing to stop irregular migration into her country by boat. Keir Starmer has abandoned Sunak’s Rwanda scheme, but not everything has changed in Whitehall and today he is in Italy for talks with Meloni and to see if he can learn anything that might help Labour reduce small boat crossings.

In a press release about the trip, Downing Street said:

As part of the visit Keir Starmer will discuss with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni her country’s success in tackling irregular migration. Italy has seen a 60 per cent drop in irregular migration by sea over the past year thanks to tough enforcement and international cooperation.

As Aletha Adu and Rajeev Syal report, this has not gone down well with some Labour MPs, and with charities that support refugees.

We will hear Starmer himself speak at a press conference later, but this morning Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, has been doing a media round and this is what she told Sky News when its presenter, Kay Burley, asked her why Labour was interested in learning from a hard-right European government. Cooper replied:

Well, we’ve always worked with other democratically elected countries, including those led by political parties that we’re not aligned with. The last Labour government did that. Other governments have done that. That’s just always been the case. It’s part of making sure that we are pursuing Britain’s interests, working internationally with other governments.

The areas that I think are important in terms of working with Italy are particularly around tackling organised immigration crime, the smuggler and the trafficking gangs. Italy has been doing this, they have made some significant progress on doing this.

And also on the partnership working that they’ve been doing with other countries, working upstream to prevent dangerous journeys in the first place. And there’s been a 60% reduction in boat crossings across the Mediterranean to Italy. That means that fewer lives being put at risk in the Mediterranean. It also means addressing some of these border security issues. We do need to work with other countries on this.

The Italian government is also preparing to send asylum seekers to Albania to have their claims processed and Starmer has hinted that he might consider adopting a similar plan. The Alabanian plan is not the same as the Tories’ Rwanda plan; Rwanda was a pure deportation scheme – anyone being sent there could claim asylum, but only in Rwanda, not in the UK, because it involved a blanket ban on people arriving in small boats claiming asylum in the UK. The Albanian plan is just about offshore processing; people will still be able to claim asylum in Italy, but they will be held in Albania while their applications are processed.

But the similarities (people arriving by boat being taken to a third country) have spooked some campaigners, and on Sky News Burley asked why an Albanian-type scheme might be acceptable to Labour when the Rwanda scheme wasn’t. Cooper replied:

The Italian arrangement with Albania is not yet up and running, and we will be interested to see how that develops. We’ve always said we would look at what works. It is a very different kind of programme from the Rwanda one.

The Rwanda scheme was run for two and a half years by the Conservatives. They spent £700m on sending four volunteers to Rwanda. That is not a workable programme.

The arrangement that Italy has with Albania is a very different one. It’s effectively around having a fast-track for those who have arrived from predominantly safe countries, and is also a scheme that is monitored by the UNHCR as well to make sure that proper standards are in place. We will see how it develops. We have always said we will look and see what works in any country.

Asked to confirm that the government was considering an Albanian-type scheme, Cooper said “we’ll see how the Italy-Albania arrangement develops”. But the government’s priority was tackling the gangs, she said. When Burley asked her again if Albania was an option, Cooper replied:

It’s not in place at the moment, so no. As we’ve always said, we will look at anything that works. But no, that’s not the scheme that we’re looking at at the moment. What we’re looking at at the moment is developing new Europol taskforces.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am (UK time): Keir Starmer visits the Italian border operations control room. He is due to record a pooled clip for broadcasters. Later he has got a lunch meeting with the Italian PM, Giorgia Meloni, and at 1pm (UK time) they are due to hold a press conference.

11am: Daisy Cooper, the deputy Lib Dem leader and health spokesperson, speaks at the Lib Dem conference in Brighton. Jane Dodds, the speaker of the Welsh Lib Dems, is speaking in the afternoon, and during the day there are debates on topics including proportional representation and how well the party did at the election (in the morning) and Gaza and prisons policy (in the afternoon).

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