Robert Jenrick, the new shadow justice secretary, mocked Sir Keir over his latest crackdown on migrant small boat Channel crossings as he claimed “the people smugglers are laughing at you”.

The Prime Minister insisted his £150million package of measures designed to stop the boats as he repeated his pledge to treat the smuggling gangs the same as terrorists.

But Mr Jenrick, who was appointed to Kemi Badenoch’s shadow cabinet yesterday, said Labour’s decision to scrap the Tories’ Rwanda deportation plan meant it was now “open season” for the crossings.

He said: “The people smugglers are laughing at you.

“You scrapped, not strengthened, the Rwanda plan.

“And 17,000 illegal migrants have crossed on small boats since you entered No10.

“It’s open season now.”

Migration Watch UK chairman Alp Mehmet warned processing claims more quickly “does nothing of the sort” and simply “passes the burden onto local authorities and adds strength to the already-powerful magnet” pulling asylum seekers to the UK.

He said: “It’s an open invitation for anyone claiming to be from these countries to make their way here,” he said. “Starmer’s speech today… effectively gives up on border control. Full of platitudinous waffle.

“He called on the world ‘to wake up to the challenge of people smuggling’ – if only he would wake up from his pipe-dream of smashing the gangs.”

The Prime Minister announced a £75million spending drive on border security at the Interpol General Assembly in Glasgow today – as both he and Home Secretary pledged to “stamp out” criminal smuggling gang networks.

Part of that is set to go to dealing with “unprocessed claims”, the PM said – but the plan has been slated as “effectively giving up on border control”.

Mr Mehmet called the £75million boost “peanuts”.

Speaking to GB News, he said: “While additional resources on tackling illegal Channel crossings is welcome, there’s still no sign that the Government means business on small boats.

“Only making clear that illegal arrivals will not be permitted to stay will send the right message to traffickers and migrants.

Speaking at an Interpol event in Glasgow yesterday, Sir Keir said: “I think we should move all the cases through the system much more quickly.

“One of the problems we’ve got is that the last Government didn’t process the claims. That left us in the worst of all worlds, which was unprocessed claims.

“More and more people being added to the list of people who need to be processed, all of them being housed in hotels, and you got into this complete fundamental problem.

“We do need to process claims. Obviously, we can triage them in terms of what can be done when we’ve got to get claims sorted out.

“We’ve got to get appeals sorted out, and we need to get removing people.”