Nigel Farage has praised Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni after an Albanian court approved a controversial agreement to send asylum seekers to Albania.
Speaking on GB News, the former Brexit Party leader said Meloni has succeeded in coming up with a plan to deal with the migrant crisis in her country, something he says the UK Government has so far failed to achieve.
Under the agreement, the Italian government will build two centres in northern Albania.
The centres are set to process 36,000 people hoping to reach Italy each year.
Nigel Farage has praised Meloni's 'wit'
GB NEWS / GETTY
Farage compared the plan to Rishi Sunak’s bid to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, which has so far come unstuck in courts.
“If only we had the wit to do what Meloni has done”, said Farage.
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Nigel Farage joined Patrick Christys on GB News
GB NEWS
Sunak is facing calls to follow a similar policy to Meloni
PA“Doing a deal with Albania would have been rather cleverer, wouldn’t it?
“But our Government aren’t really up to that.”
Asked why the UK Government haven’t considered sending migrants to Albania instead of Rwanda, Farage spoke on the aspirant EU member being a “holiday destination”.
“It is a country that does exist under something we’d recognise as at the rule of law”, he said.
“Doing a deal with Rwanda is more tricky, given we have actually been giving asylum to people from Rwanda.”
“There are questions about Rwanda, but Meloni has come up with something far cleverer than what our idiots have managed.”
Sunak was under renewed pressure as projections put net migration on course to swell the UK by more than six million people by the middle of the next decade.
The Prime Minister’s critics on the Conservative right urged him to act after the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the population could reach nearly 74 million by 2036.
Some 92% of the 6.6 million projected growth – or 6.1 million people – was attributed to migration in the research based on current and past trends.
Downing Street insisted Sunak wants net migration to “come down quickly” but was not backing a call from former home secretary Suella Braverman to introduce a cap on numbers.