Look behind all the flummery, the exaggerated public gestures of affection and the relentless self-congratulation during President Emmanuel Macron‘s state visit to Britain this week – the first by a French head of state for 17 years – and what do you find by way of substance? Pretty much nothing.
Despite the windy rhetoric and relentless spin, with Keir Starmer in full-on global statesman mode and Macron at his aloof, preening, verbose worst, what was actually achieved barely amounted to a row of beans – or as the French would say ne vaut pas un clou (literally: not worth a nail).
Take the much touted ‘one in, one out’ deal for illegal migrants coming across the Channel by small boat.
The Starmer-Macron lovefest reached its peak on Thursday when this latest wheeze to stop the boat people was unveiled. On that very day, 600 of them were making their perilous way to the Kent coast, including 78 (74 of them male) in a dinghy obligingly escorted by the French navy, which ensured a safe handover to a UK Border Force vessel. But not before asking for their life-jackets back. The French clearly realise they’ll be used multiple times before the summer is out.
Yet Starmer, deploying the hyperbole for which he’s become notorious, claims the deal he’s struck with Macron is ‘groundbreaking’ in deterring small boats. Nobody seems to have told the people still crossing in their droves.
The idea is that migrants who come here illegally will be returned to France (that’s the ‘one out’) to be replaced by an asylum seeker based in France prepared to use the legal route to make it to the UK (that’s the ‘one in’). Even those of you who are not mathematicians will have noticed this won’t necessarily reduce the overall numbers.
More important, Starmer claims it means those arriving here illegally will be ‘returned in short order’. Even for a politician increasingly a stranger to the truth, this is a porkie on quite a scale.
Starmer knows full well that attempts to return people who have claimed asylum in the UK to France will trigger endless challenges in the courts from his prosperous old legal chums grifting in the human rights industry.
It’s worth wondering if Macron’s heart is in it, despite all the hugging of Starmer
Nor is it clear if the returns will ever reach the sort of numbers sufficient to act as a deterrent. The French indicated that up to 50 a week could be returned during the pilot phase, though yesterday Home Secretary Yvette Cooper couldn’t even confirm that number, which is minuscule relative to the problem.
Around 50 a week would mean 2,600 a year. Yet 44,000 have crossed the Channel in small boats since Labour came to power, of which at most only one in 17 could be returned during a year-long pilot phase. Not much of a deterrent for migrants prepared to risk their lives and their life-savings to make the journey.
At the rate envisaged for the pilot, it would take almost three months just to clear the 600 who arrived on Thursday.
Of course a successful pilot could be scaled up. But Cooper is unable to put any timeline or numbers on that either. The French government and media are suspiciously silent on the matter, too.
And, let us not forget, the deal requires the ‘legal verification’ of the European Commission and EU member states, of which five with Mediterranean coastlines and boat-people problems of their own have already expressed serious reservations.
It’s worth wondering if Macron’s heart is in it, despite all the hugging of Starmer. During his eight years as president (he has two more to go) ‘France’s doors have never been more open’, as one Paris newspaper put it.
Many more legal and illegal immigrants have arrived in France under his watch than even during the time of his socialist predecessor Francois Hollande.
French asylum applications are at a record high as is the doling out of residence permits – from fewer than three million a decade ago to more than four million now – for migrants waiting to become citizens. None of this seems to faze Macron, who lives in a world far removed from the problems of mass immigration.
44,000 have crossed the Channel in small boats since Labour came to power
He reserved his enthusiasm for yet another bash at Brexit, even though the referendum is now nine years ago, claiming Britain had been ‘sold a lie’ that it would reduce immigration. In fact, he argued, Brexit had made illegal migration worst because we now had ‘no migratory agreement with the EU’.
This is flannel of a high order. Under the so-called Dublin Regulations, EU member states could send asylum seekers back to the EU country from whence they’d come. The numbers involved were always piddling and it was a two-way street: we could send some back but the rest of the EU could send them to us — and we were always net recipients. In 2018, for example, we sent back 209 asylum-seekers to other EU member states — and took in 1,215 from them. A six to one deficit.
Macron re-writes recent history because he still loves to dish out punishment beatings to the British for having the temerity to leave his beloved EU.
More than any other European leader he has stood in the way of a mutually beneficial modus vivendi between post-Brexit Britain and the EU. Which is why, for all the warm words he emitted during the state visit, France will always be an unreliable ally with Macron in the Elysee.
Starmer seems unaware of all this, being unversed in Franco-British affairs or history. On Thursday he said there was ‘no greater demonstration’ of the alliance between the two countries than the new deal he’d struck on nuclear co-ordination.
‘From today, our adversaries will know that any extreme threat to this continent would prompt a response from our two nations,’ he claimed.
It’s unclear what any of this means. Britain has long committed its nuclear deterrent to the defence of Nato. France has not. My efforts to discover if that is what France now intends — after this week’s so called ‘Northwood Declaration’ — were met with a distinctly Gallic shrug in Paris.
Of course it would make sense to operate the two nuclear deterrents more in tandem to amplify their lethal threat. But for Starmer to claim that, if we threaten an adversary with nuclear attack, so will the French, only illustrates what a novice he is in such matters.
Starmer’s personal ratings are in the dirt. He presides over a hollowed-out military and a stagnant economy. Macron is in even worse shape
The same is true when it comes to conventional forces. Fifteen years ago, at Lancaster House, Britain and France agreed to unprecedented military cooperation including a joint expeditionary force under a unified chain of command.
Since then not much has happened. But on Thursday it was decided to increase this largely inactive force fivefold to make it 50,000 strong. Nobody had the heart to point out Britain has nothing like enough troops to meet its side of the bargain.
The tragedy is that Europe — indeed Nato — needs the closest possible Franco-British cooperation now that the US is retreating from this side of the Atlantic.
But Starmer and Macron are not the duo who can deliver. Starmer’s personal ratings are in the dirt. He presides over a hollowed-out military and a stagnant economy.
Macron is in even worse shape. Not just a lame-duck (because he cannot run again in 2027) but the most unpopular president in the 66-year history of the French Fifth Republic.
He’s gone through six prime ministers in eight years, during which the French economy has turned into as much of a basket case as Britain’s, with massive budget deficits and a national debt heading for 130 per cent of GDP.
This week we had to endure the strutting of two losers puffed up by delusions of their own significance. Better Franco-British times, essential as they are, will have to wait for different leaders.
Much as the prospect sends a shiver down the spine, I’m not sure Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen would do a worse job.
That is the measure of this week’s failure.
