Shadow Business and Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds was chatting last night on GB News about Labour’s gold-plated plan for solving illegal migration. Which apparently involves letting in tens of thousands more people…

Labour says that it will process the list of arrivals since the Illegal Migration Act passed last year whose claim is designated by the Home Office as “inadmissible” – Patrick Christys pointed out that, according to estimates, somewhere between 90,000 and 115,000 people would be entitled to claim asylum if that processing was carried out without deportations. Reynolds seemed to let the cat out of the bag with his response:

“Well, what’s the alternative? Keeping them in hotels at the cost of 18 million pounds, £8 million a day, indefinitely? They’re going to have to reply. And if they haven’t got a right to be in the UK, they’ve got to go. And if they have a right to be in the UK, if we want to accept those people, we can integrate them into British society and they can benefit from putting something back into the UK rather than just be a cost in the halfway house we have at the minute.“

Labour has to repeal or disapply chunks of the Illegal Migration Act to force the Home Office to process the inadmissible claims. An asylum amnesty: that doesn’t sound much like a deterrent…