'Keir Starmer cannot be trusted on immigration - Labour will just shift responsibility to local authorities'

We’d heard it all during the election campaign, and for months before the election was called. They are going to smash the gangs – they of course won’t.

However much Ms Cooper dresses it up and whatever meagre additional resources she promises for the task, there is very little that hasn’t been tried or isn’t already being done.

They will get rid of the backlog (read: we will wave them through/declare an amnesty).

In reality, all they will achieve by granting asylum or doling out leave to remain on the nod is shift responsibility for looking after those in the queue from central government to local authorities around the country.

The job of housing and keeping them will be passed to LAs, while Home Office expenditure will, seemingly, be reduced at a stroke.

This is the statement’s final, meaningless, paragraph: “The government’s intention is to return to using long-standing dispersed asylum accommodation and will do so as soon as is practicable, once we have made progress on clearing the backlog. Any decision regarding the use of accommodation sites will be fully considered, with a firm focus on value for money and ensuring proper standards are in place.”

Sir Humphrey could not have put it better. The boats will continue to stream illegally across the Channel for so long as migrants can pour into the EU in their hundreds of thousands, make their way with ease within the Schengen Area to the north-western shores of France, while the French authorities do little to stop them jumping into dinghies.

Why wouldn’t they when they know that once they’ve made it onto the water, even if only feet away from a French beach, they have all but made it to good old Blighty? Or, as Natacha Bouchat, the mayor of Calais calls it, El Dorado.

We are accepting anyone and everyone who makes it here and spins a yarn that is difficult to disprove.

We do it despite being unable to check identity or back story because documents that might help establish the truth have been destroyed.

Thousands have been given the benefit of the doubt and accepted as minors, only to be later found to have lied.

How ironic that the Germans are now thinking of picking up where we left off with the Rwanda plan, utilising the accommodation we generously put in place for them. Well done, Sir Keir.

As for overall migration, we have long believed it to be too high. It is now some ten times the rate of those coming illegally in dinghies.

The massive scale poses much greater risks to the future stability, cohesion and nature of our society.

Even if the net inflow were to be 315,000 p.a. (it’s currently around double this and likely to remain high), as is assumed in the latest Office for National Statistics projections, it will lead to a population increase of about nine million in the next 22 years – that is around eight cities the size of Birmingham.

This is in addition to the seven million of eight million increase in the population between the 2001 and 2021 censuses.

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The British public are, of course, very concerned, and why opinion has reverted to the levels of eight to ten years ago. A YouGov tracker poll of September 2 found that 60 per cent of the public now think that immigration has been too high in the past decade.

The same poll found immigration tying at 49 per cent with the economy as the most important issue facing the country. 40 per cent thought that immigration had been mostly bad for Britain, double the number that thought it was good.

And yet, Sir Keir and his Home Secretary say little about controlling runaway legal immigration, and even less on reducing it.

There is clearly a serious disconnect between our government and the public on immigration. The sooner the PM and his Home Secretary address this, the better it will be for us all.