Priti Patel has revealed she met with European Union officials in Brussels last month to advise them on migration policy, The London Economic has learnt.
The Tory shadow foreign secretary has said she regularly talks to EU leaders due to her experience in government as dozens of European countries search for “remedies” to deal with the migration “crisis”.
Patel insisted Brexit brought “freedoms,” allowing the UK to “move out of the institutional straitjackets of frameworks,” while rejecting the notion that it had distanced the nation from Europe.
It comes as Keir Starmer vows to “reset” the UK’s relationship with the EU after welcoming leaders to London last month.
Asked if it was time to rebuild bridges with the EU, she told the India Global Forum: “The whole Brexit debate became hugely political and polarised but the reality is Brexit is about freedoms. The chance to have freedoms and to move out of the institutional straitjackets of frameworks that membership of the European Union certainly gave us.
“I speak to counterparts across Europe every single week and I’ve been to the European Parliament in the last month and I’ve met the officials there, as well as political leaders of other political parties.”
She added: “They are centre-right parties that are in government and they are actually coming to us for policy remedies.”
“I’ll tell you one issue,” she explained. “Migration in Europe. There is a crisis. I told them they’d be a crisis five years ago on migration and legal migration. Now they are coming to us for some remedies around third-party country processing and changing their laws.”
Her comments appear to contradict Kemi Badenoch’s suggestion that she is looking at copying an EU country’s policy that would see migrants forcibly moved out of inner cities to avoid the build-up of “ghettos”. Speaking at the Policy Exchange think tank yesterday, the Tory leader said the Danish plan is something she’ll be talking about more in future.