The trip to Albania of the PM shows a delicate path on migration

A few days to try to sound muscular his desire to press the legal migration, the Prime Minister is in Albania by focusing on illegal arrivals.

The country of the Balkans has provided a rare British success in incredibly difficult politics and diplomacy to try to reduce illegal migration.

In 2022, around 12,500 Albanians crossed the English chain by small boat, but the number has since reduced massively.

The last government, and recently this one, has set up campaigns to discourage people who try the trip and many more migrants have been returned.

Sir Keir Starmer wanted to look at this success inherited from the Conservatives and sought to make the virtue of being the first British Prime Minister to make an official visit to the country.

But he also wanted to talk about negotiations with a handful of anonymous European countries that could temporarily take failed asylum seekers who have exhausted all avenues to stay in the United Kingdom.

Downing Street told journalists that the decision could stop failed asylum seekers blocking the deportation “using various tactics, whether it is to lose their paperwork or to use other tactics to frustrate their withdrawal.”

The PM spokesperson added that this would guarantee that they could not make their withdrawal more difficult either “using tactics such as starting a family”.

It is an interesting idea, which establishes initial parallels with the plan of the last government to send migrants to Rwanda, but is different.

The conservatives wanted to send people to the African country immediately after their arrival in the United Kingdom, to submit an asylum complaint there or another “safe” country.

They supported, given the figures arriving on small boats, a change in radical policy was necessary to discourage people.

The work argued that it was a very expensive waste of money and deleted the idea.

Now they speak their own narrower plan.

But curiosity is that they have chosen to do exactly this during a visit to a country that is not interested in hosting what are called “return centers”.

And we had to discover that, quite frankly, when little earlier that Sir Keir Starmer had pleaded for the idea, the man stood next to him, his Albanian counterpart Edi Rama, said that they would only make the one they already have with Italy, their neighbor during the Adriatic Sea.

Downing Street insisted that its own agreement with Albania was “never planned in the context of discussions”.

In short, however, they had failed to guarantee the most catchy idea they were talking about corresponded to the photos, in the background, to the scene on which they were.

Cue the conservatives, whose own record on the small level passages was poor, but which can indicate this specific success with Albania, entering the clumsy juxtaposition of Sir Keir and marking him an “embarrassment”.

This is another episode that recalls how difficult it is to find solutions achievable, practical and deliverable to a massive and complex problem, that many government recognize that they must simply take a point.

Either way.