It is not yet peak season for the booming trade in Channel migrant crossings, yet already this is a bumper year. So far this week, seven small boats have made their way to the south coast, dumping hundreds more illegal migrants on our shores. Last week, 882 passengers made it to the UK in a single day – each and every one of them carrying a huge price tag for the British taxpayer.
God knows who all these people are and what their real business is in our country. After all, many deliberately arrive with no documents, jettisoning passports and other identification before they clamber into the rubber dinghies. Some may indeed be real refugees who deserve sanctuary. One day, maybe they will even make a positive contribution to our society – though there is little evidence to suggest that most are high-skilled in anything other than the enterprise it takes to cross continents and deal with criminal gangs.
One thing is increasingly apparent however: under a Labour government, the minute Channel migrants set foot on the Kent shingle, they will be here to stay. For as he has demonstrated time and again during this election campaign, Sir Keir Starmer’s only plan to stop the boats is as realistic as standing in a raging storm with a fishing net trying to catch the wind and the rain. It is doomed to fail.
Challenged as to how he will stop the boats, the Leader of the Opposition only ever has one answer – and it
is an approach that has already demonstrably failed. In a robotic manner that would be comical were it not so serious, he talks of “smashing the vile criminal gangs” behind the trade. The problem is that identifying and eliminating every single one of the players in what has become a highly sophisticated global trade – and preventing them ever being able to operate again – would literally take forever.
As Rishi Sunak points out, the Home Office is already trying very hard to dismantle the gangs, with some degree of success. Last year, enforcement agencies caught and convicted 141 people smugglers, 80 for piloting small boats. Has that stopped the “vile trade”? Of course not. For as long as there is demand, there will be a supply.
Starmer likens the challenge to tackling terrorism, hoping to impress voters with his record as a former director of public prosecutions. In reality, the illegal drugs trade, which continues to flourish despite the best efforts of all the enforcement agencies in the world, offers a better comparison.
Like the migrant crossings, it is driven by a huge number of ordinary people who want the product, can scrape together the cash to pay and are prepared to take the very small risk of getting caught or hurt. Nothing Starmer can do will change any of this – which is why the Prime Minister is right that the only way forward is to create a deterrent. That means making something like Rwanda work – or (much better) safely turning back the boats. Until that happens, crossings will continue. The question is what Starmer will do with those who come.
Six times during the latest BBC election debate, the Labour leader refused to say. Looking blank-faced, the best he could offer was that any new arrivals would be “processed”. Under pressure, he made vague noises about “returning” those found not to have a valid asylum case. As Sunak rightly pointed out, since many claim to be from Iran, Afghanistan and Syria, that means negotiating with the ayatollahs, the Taliban and the tyrant who used chemical weapons to gas his own people: President Bashar al-Assad.
Starmer’s deputy, Angela Rayner, has shed rather more light on the matter, revealing that Labour is hatching a disturbing plan to distribute asylum seekers more evenly across the country. It sounds very much as if every council will be forced to accept quotas, and to build the additional housing required. It remains to be seen how this will go down in places like Devon, Cornwall and Oxfordshire, among all the affluent supporters of parties like the Greens that support open borders. How will they react when their pretty villages are despoiled by cheap new housing for young men who don’t speak English?
If the polls are to be believed, voters will very soon see this lunacy for what it is. The pretence that any of it will work simply cannot be sustained. Swept into power on a tidal wave of frustration with all the problems unlimited immigration brings, a Starmer premiership will begin to sink the minute it begins.