Why are Sir Keir Starmer and Labour unable to reduce the number of migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats?
Last week, as Vice-President J.D. Vance accused Europe of ‘engaging in civilisational suicide’, our Government established a bleak record. More than 25,000 migrants have come across the Channel so far this year, a 50 per cent increase on 2024. It seems certain that 2025 will be the worst year ever.
Starmer vowed to stop the boats, though of course has been completely ineffectual. The Government has introduced a multitude of measures, all to no effect. In July last year, a few weeks after the election, the PM promised in a newspaper article that he would ‘smash the vile criminal gangs’ organising the small boats.
With breathtaking arrogance he wrote: ‘As leader of the Crown Prosecution Service I worked on operations that took down terrorist networks across Europe. I will never accept the same approach cannot be applied to the people smugglers.’ He used similar language many times.
A year has passed, and ‘the same approach’ manifestly hasn’t worked. There are daily protests outside hotels housing migrants (average nightly bill £119, admittedly down from £162 in March 2023) which could spiral into something nasty.
Following last month’s disturbances near a hotel in Epping housing migrants, anti-racism activists clashed with police and anti-migrant protesters on Saturday in Islington, north London, outside a hotel where asylum seekers are being accommodated.
Over the weekend, anti-immigrant protests also took place outside a hotel in Newcastle. The group was met by demonstrators carrying placards proclaiming ‘refugees welcome’. Some of them reportedly waved Palestinian flags.
None of us can know whether these so far relatively isolated protests will become more widespread, as happened last August in the wake of the Southport attack. But the mood of the country does seem febrile.
All this illuminates the enormity of Starmer’s failure over the small boats. So I repeat my question. Why, despite his undertaking to smash the gangs and his evident realisation that unless he fulfils his promise he and Labour are political toast, have things only got worse?
The Government should be turning its attention to the people who enable the Channel crossings and make the whole thing possible, writes Stephen Glover
It’s simple. Sir Keir has been chasing the wrong people.
Yes, the leaders of the gangs are ruthless, mercenary, heartless criminals who don’t give a fig for the lives of the migrants whom they load into often defective boats. At least 18 people have died so far this year.
But smashing the gangs is an operational impossibility. Arrest one leader and another will emerge. The trade is so lucrative. All the new intelligence of which Starmer boasts plus the extra boats and the enhanced powers of Border Security Command are likely to be of marginal benefit.
The Government’s latest feeble policy is to outlaw social media adverts promoting journeys on small boats. Perpetrators – if caught – could be sentenced for up to five years in prison and receive a hefty fine. How gang leaders must be quaking.
Instead of trying and failing to smash the gangs, the Government should be turning its attention to the people who enable the Channel crossings and make the whole thing possible. I mean the migrants themselves.
In Labour’s misguided conception, the gang leaders are vile but the migrants are innocent victims. The first proposition is true, the second is false. Those crossing the Channel are trying to break into this country without having been invited.
Some are the victims of persecution but most are simply in search of a better life. The majority are young men, among whom there are bound to be a few whose values and standards are at odds with people who live here.
The latest example is that of two Afghan asylum seekers who have been charged over the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton. Sources told The Mail on Sunday that Warwickshire Police advised local councillors and officials not to reveal the background of the two suspects for fear of ‘inflaming community tensions’.
As migrants look at the white cliffs of Dover, they know that once they have been picked up by a Border Force boat they’ll be fed and housed and given a small allowance. Most important of all, they are well aware that, although they came to this country uninvited, they will very likely be permitted to stay.
In the year to March 2025, 99 per cent of migrants from Sudan were granted asylum. The figure for Syria was 98 per cent, and 86 per cent from Eritrea. At the other end of the scale, only 30 per cent of migrants from Iraq were allowed to remain and 19 per cent from Vietnam.
Even those refused asylum may well appeal, and will have to be looked after by the taxpayer as their cases wend their way through a costly and overstretched system of tribunals. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said yesterday that she intends to speed up the process.
More than 25,000 migrants have come across the Channel so far this year, a 50 per cent increase on 2024
She’ll have her work cut out as battalions of human rights lawyers looking for briefs succeed in clogging up the works. In March there were nearly 51,000 outstanding appeals, almost seven times the number in 2023.
The Government is tinkering at the edges when it should be focused on how best to deter migrants from arriving in the first place. That is the only way Sir Keir Starmer can solve this problem – and save his party from electoral annihilation.
In its dying days the last Tory Government finally grasped the importance of deterrence. Migrants who crossed the Channel were not permitted to claim asylum and in theory could be removed to a third country such as Rwanda.
Unfortunately, the Rwanda plan never got off the ground because it was subject to repeated legal challenges on the basis that the African nation is authoritarian, and migrants might not be safe there. But at least the Tories tried.
Not so Sir Keir Starmer, who in his pig-headed way recklessly binned the Rwanda scheme, and permitted those crossing the Channel once again to claim asylum. Unless the Government comes up with some way of discouraging cross-Channel immigration, the numbers will continue to increase.
Starmer won’t eat humble pie and revive the Rwanda plan, but he could do something similar. Or he could locate a windswept British island and send migrants there. That would certainly act as a deterrent.
It’s hard to see how the Government will be able to act effectively as long as lawyers can challenge it in the European Court of Human Rights. Withdrawing from it would be a bridge too far for Starmer, while the very idea would cause palpitations in Attorney General (and ex-human rights lawyer) Lord Hermer.
But unless Starmer finds a way – and quickly – of deterring illegal migration, he might as well sign his own political death warrant, and that of his party.
More worrying for me is the prospect that, without action, there will be more civil unrest. People have had enough. There is a general weariness about uncontrolled legal mass migration but an even greater resistance to large groups of young men from alien cultures being housed unsupervised in our midst.
Smashing the gangs is a futile policy. Deterring migrants is the only solution – and Starmer had better get on with it while he still has time.
