Starmer's migrant deal with Macron is a promising start

The prime minister has been criticised for the modesty of the agreement that he has secured with the French president on cross-Channel migration. He should instead be congratulated for having obtained a returns deal at all.

It is more than his Conservative predecessors managed, and it is certainly more than Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform and peddler of "simple" solutions, could do, according to The Independent.

The modesty of the arrangement is sensible. Returning undocumented migrants is a complex matter, legally and logistically. It is a good idea to show "proof of concept", as government sources put it, on a small scale, to show that it would be possible with larger numbers. The pilot scheme has already been attacked by the Conservatives on the grounds that it would not be a deterrent. If Britain is able to return 50 people a week to France, that would amount to a small fraction, about 5 per cent, of the numbers currently arriving by small boat.

As Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, points out, this means that those attempting the crossing would know that they have a 95 per cent chance of staying in the UK as long as they make it halfway across the Channel, when they have to be picked up by the British authorities.

But Mr Philp is missing at least two points. One is that, if the scheme works, it could be expanded. The other is that he argues that the Rwanda scheme would have acted as a deterrent, even though its total capacity of a few hundred would have taken even fewer migrants than this pilot scheme. Mr Farage is even further off beam. His policy is to return migrants to French beaches without permission and by violating French waters. It is hard to see how that can end well, let alone with many migrants being returned.

He and Mr Philp would do better to congratulate Sir Keir Starmer for his negotiating skill and his success in landing the deal with Emmanuel Macron that Rishi Sunak tried and failed to secure.

We will now be able to discover what is possible rather than listening to lectures about what would have happened if the Rwanda scheme, which the Conservatives had years to implement but which Mr Sunak chose to abandon by calling an election, had gone ahead. Sir Keir was right to cancel the cruel, expensive and ineffective scheme, and now offers the prospect of something better and potentially workable.

The whole point of a pilot scheme is that we will be able to find out whether migrants will be able to frustrate the policy by appealing to the courts. The plan will probably require a new fast-track legal channel, so that new boat arrivals can be turned round quickly, in which case it would make sense to test that on a smaller scale.

And the other half of the plan, to take an equivalent number of genuine refugees whose claim of a family connection to the UK has been accepted at a processing centre in France, is also fraught with difficulty. How will claims be ranked in order of priority? Again, starting with small numbers is the right approach.

Obviously, the end point desired by Sir Keir and indeed by most of the British people, would be a larger scheme which would then quickly become a very small one. If migrants knew that they could not stay in the UK, they would stop trying to cross the Channel altogether.

Sir Keir's critics are right about one thing: deterrence is key. French beach patrols may stop some crossings, especially if the dinghies are punctured, but they cannot stop the demand for a new life in Britain. This scheme offers the chance of humane deterrence. This is a nettle that must be grasped, not just by the UK and France, but by the whole of Europe. Sir Keir and Mr Macron have made a promising start.