The Windrush backstory to Starmer’s ‘campaign’ to let foreign criminals stay

As farmers descended on Whitehall for another protest against inheritance tax changes, Kemi Badenoch used PMQs not to attack Sir Keir on this topic – but to grill him on immigration.

It was a risky decision given her party’s own record on the subject – it was only a fortnight ago that revised figures from the ONS showed net migration reached a record high of almost one million under the Tories’ watch.

Ms Badenoch has recently admitted The Tories got immigration “wrong” – so, perhaps feels politically able to criticise the government on the subject.

Politics Live: Badenoch ‘misfires’ with PMQs topic

In particular, she attacked Sir Keir over some of his work on immigration before he became Labour leader – accusing him of “demanding that foreign criminals be allowed to stay in Britain”.

This might be an attack line we start to see more often – but what exactly is she talking about?

During PMQs, Ms Badenoch said: “Four years ago, the prime minister signed a letter demanding that foreign criminals be allowed to stay in Britain. Dozens of Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs repeatedly signed these letters, insisting that rapists and murderers be allowed to stay here.”

She added that one of those criminals was Ernesto Elliott, who she said had 17 convictions and went on to kill someone after his deportation was blocked.

Ms Badenoch was referring to a letter signed by Sir Keir in February 2020, a few months before he was elected Labour leader.

The letter to then prime minister Boris Johnson expressed opposition to plans to deport around 50 people with criminal convictions to Jamaica on a charter flight.

It highlighted that two years earlier the Windrush scandal had “shook this country” after the government had been found to have been detaining and deporting people who had the right to live in the UK for decades.

It noted that at the height of the scandal, “the government suspended charter flights as they could not guarantee that no wrongful deportations would take place”.

The letter warned that the upcoming deportation flight posed a risk of removing people with a Windrush claim, and called for “all further deportations” to be cancelled until the Windrush Lessons Learned Review was published and its recommendations implemented.

The flight the MPs were referring to ultimately took off, but with 17 people rather than 50 after last minute legal challenges.

The government lost a ruling after a judge said some of the detainees had not been able to get proper access to legal advice.

The Home Office had said those being deported were guilty of serious crimes like manslaughter, rape and dealing Class-A drugs.

But campaigners argued some of the people affected had lived in the UK since they were children, committed one-time offences when they were young and had no links with Jamaica. They argued it was a “double punishment”, given these people had served their time already.

Those on board were understood to have served a total of 75 years in prison.

Ernesto Elliott, who Ms Badenoch referred to, was due to be on a different deportation flight, on 2 December 2020, after being convicted of knife crime, according to media reports.

His deportation was blocked alongside several others following a legal challenge, and in 2023 he was convicted of robbing and fatally stabbing a man in Greenwich, London.

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Ms Badenoch accused Sir Keir of “repeatedly signing letters” – though it is not clear what else she is referring to, as he didn’t sign the letter from MPs calling for the December deportation flight to be halted.

More than 80 black public figures had campaigned against that flight, including model Naomi Campbell and historian David Olusoga.

The decision to grant some people a reprieve was ultimately made by the courts.

Sir Keir responded to the attack by saying he was prosecuting criminals for five years when he was the director of the Crown Prosecution Service and dedicated his life to locking up criminals.

He accused Ms Badenoch of failing to show a “slither of remorse” over the Tories’ immigration failures, comparing her to “an arsonist complaining about the person putting the fire out.”