Labour will not say how many more migrants it would accept under a returns deal with the EU if it comes to power, as senior party figures insist that they do not want to be bound by quotas.
Keir Starmer said this week that if he became prime minister, he would seek a deal with the EU to return some new arrivals to mainland Europe while allowing others to enter Britain.
His comments triggered claims from senior Conservatives that he planned to oversee 100,000 extra arrivals, which the Labour leader dismissed in an interview broadcast on Sunday as “complete garbage”.
Starmer told Sky News’s Trevor Phillips: “We will not be part of [an EU quota system], we are not an EU member. This is why what the government is saying has been complete garbage.”
Labour officials admit that any migration deal with the EU would require the UK to accept some people coming the other way, but Pat McFadden, the party’s elections coordinator, insisted on Sunday that it did not want to sign up to any hard and fast quotas.
“I don’t think it’s going to be an allocation of numbers,” he told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg. “We’re talking about individual cases where a child may have strong family links here. It’s not ‘We will take this many, you take that many.’ That’s not the kind of negotiation that we want to have.”
Pushed by Times Radio to say how many extra people Labour might accept under a new agreement, McFadden said: “I don’t think you can predict what the numbers will be when they’re growing the way they have been in recent years.”
Starmer spent Friday and Saturday in Montreal talking to fellow leaders of centre-left parties from around the world, including Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, and his Norwegian counterpart, Jonas Gahr Støre.
A Labour spokesperson said Starmer had told the Global Progress Action Summit that he believed the west was facing an “axis of instability” from climate change, cross-border people smuggling, terrorism and assaults on democracy.
“If we are to succeed in our generational challenge of taking them on, we need a rewiring of global thinking and new partnerships,” the Labour leader said.
On Tuesday Starmer will travel to Paris for bilateral talks with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in which migration is likely to feature heavily.
The meeting will help Starmer burnish his credentials as a potential prime minister in waiting, and is the latest stop on his tour as he seeks to build international relationships. Macron regularly meets opposition leaders of countries with close ties to France.
Starmer is expected to be accompanied by his new chief of staff, Sue Gray, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, and the shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy.
In an interview with Politico from Montreal, he said he believed the UK should “wean itself off” Chinese influence when it comes to trade and technology.
Speaking a week after it emerged that a parliamentary researcher had been arrested on suspicion of spying for Beijing, Starmer said: “How do we wean ourselves off Chinese influence across the world? There are big questions that progressive governments could face together.”
Government ministers, however, have defended their engagement with Beijing, including the meeting between the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and the Chinese premier, Li Qiang, in Delhi a week ago.
The foreign secretary, James Cleverly, told Kuenssberg on Sunday: “Pretending China doesn’t exist and disengaging is not a credible policy. That is why we have these conversations, so that we can have the difficult conversations.”
