The government cannot solve the small boats crisis without changing its approach to refugees
With a hapless Tory government overseeing record boat crossings and unable to get their ill-fated Rwanda plan off the ground, Keir Starmer pitched a clear remedy to the asylum crisis during the 2024 election campaign. There would be no need for fanciful schemes “which [are] going to cost a fortune” like shipping people to Rwanda, the Labour leader claimed. Nor did the former human rights lawyer think it necessary to reevaluate Britain’s obligations according to international law. Instead, a Labour government would get a grip of the situation simply by “smashing the people smuggling gangs”, those evil organisations blamed for inducing the demand for crossings, which would be carried out by an impressive sounding “Border Security Command”. “We will restore serious government to our borders,” Starmer promised. The adults would be back in charge, and the problem would be dealt with.
Over a year into office, and the only thing being smashed is the record for small boat crossings. More than 50,000 people arrived by small boat since Labour took office, with 2025 set to record the highest number of people to illegally cross the Channel ever. Starmer has quickly found himself in the same position as his predecessor Rishi Sunak: talking tough on stopping the boats, and promising the British public control over their borders, but lacking the strength or imagination to actually solve the problem.
Instead of recognising the whole asylum framework as broken and unfit for purpose, Labour have retreated into seeking technical fixes that they hope will placate an increasingly restless and fiery public. The sources of public anger have been misidentified, with the protests that have sprung up in recent months outside hotels housing asylum seekers rationalised by the government as being about the hotels rather than their occupants. It is like a cigarette smoker believing that they will solve their problem if they switch brands.
Labour has made a big deal of their intention to end the use of hotels to house asylum seekers, something they have pledged to achieve by 2029, hoping it will abate public anger. But the alternative of housing asylum seekers by taking properties off the housing market and stacking them into HMOs in residential areas across the country creates problems and grievances of its own. As the protests that broke out in Nuneaton after two asylum seekers living in the area were charged with kidnapping and raping a 12-year-old girl showed, the problem was never about the hotels themselves, and dispersal into HMOs will do little to quell public anger.
Shutting down hotels, reducing the backlog, one-in-one-out deals with France — all such attempts to overcome the asylum issue through technical tweaks to the system are in vain, for they fail to recognise that public anger is not a product of mismanagement, but is directed at the very foundations of Britain’s asylum system. The principles underlying asylum policy in Britain — treated as unquestionable and sacrosanct by Labour and the ideologically aligned Blob — are straining unsustainably in an era which is completely different to that in which they were devised.
The noble goal of providing temporary sanctuary to those whose lives were under immediate threat has been transformed into a permanent route to settlement in Britain for those whose lives fail to meet Western standards of rights and freedoms. Lecturing voters that international law gives asylum seekers the right to seek refuge in any country of their choosing, thereby making their crossing from peaceful France legally legitimate, is an unconvincing riposte to the reasonable assumption that those coming to Britain tend to do so for the greater material comforts available, rather than as a last resort necessary to stay alive. Claims that no one would willingly uproot their lives in countries far poorer and more dysfunctional to come to Britain unless they had no choice are ridiculous in the face of the millions of economic migrants who have done just that and chosen to come to Britain in recent years.
Clearly, those crossing the Channel to seek asylum are not in mortal danger, but instead choosing to do so due to the perceived benefits of living in Britain. The basis of admitting and settling them is not one of saving those in imminent danger, so why should Britain continue to do so? The usual answer, beyond the technical obligations of international treaties Britain is currently signed up to, is that the country has a moral duty to do so. It is taken for granted that anyone and everyone in the world, no matter how distant or unrelated to Britain, ought to be able to settle in Britain if they face persecution of any kind. It is this underlying belief that causes smug LBC presenters to demand that guests explain what the legal route for someone to come from Iraq to Britain is, never pausing to question why there must be a one-way funnel of people from Iraq to Britain, given the dozen or so countries that stand between the two.
Unknowingly and without ever having been consulted, the British people have been burdened with the obligation of providing a minimum set of rights and standard of living to those from anywhere in the world. If a country has yet to adopt LGBT rights, or still punishes apostates, or has a punitive conscription regime, or lacks the political freedoms customary in the West, then Britain has the obligation to remedy that wrong and guarantee those rights. But the means of doing so is not to push for those rights and freedoms to be developed in whichever country they are currently lacking; following the humiliating and humbling failure to transform Afghanistan and Iraq into model Western societies, we have given up on ensuring those societies guarantee a standard of life we might deem acceptable. Instead, where injustice reigns abroad, we have resigned ourselves to letting it continue, but to relieving its victims by resettling them in Britain, where the fight for those basic rights was won long ago.
The only solution is for the country to abandon the lofty principle of asylum that it could never keep in practice
This is an almighty obligation to have taken on, and one which can only exist if the numbers are small and the vast majority of those who might be eligible are denied. “Safe and legal routes”, the kind demanded between Iraq and Britain, do not and cannot currently exist due to the scope of eligibility being so wide as to encompass so many people that Britain would be made to admit a population multiple times its own. The problem posed by the small boats is of those who are forcing Britain to abide by the impossibly broad asylum principle to which it has committed itself — overcoming the numerical restriction that official refugee routes allow for.
Under such circumstances, the only solution is for the country to abandon the lofty principle of asylum that it could never keep in practice, and recognise that Britain’s capacity is inherently limited. As awful as it may be that Eritrean citizens are forced to do national service for their unsavoury regime, or that homosexuality is still forbidden in Iran, or that blasphemy is not possible in Pakistan, it is not the responsibility of Britain to remedy all these problems. Britain cannot be expected to treat the whole world of all its ills. As Reform’s Nigel Farage argued when unveiling his plan to overhaul the country’s asylum system: “We cannot be responsible for all the sins that take place around the world”. Failing to recognise and act on the basis of this regrettable but basic truth means Starmer is set to follow in the steps of Sunak, crushed under the weight of the small boats, and rejected by a restless electorate no longer willing to shoulder limitless obligations to which it never consented.
