Hold the front page. The government may have finally smashed part of a people-smuggling gang, or as word-mangling Keir Starmer put it in a piece to camera, a ‘people-smaggling gun’.
The details are as follows: a 44-year-old Turkish national was arrested at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam in an operation involving the UK National Crime Agency and its partner bodies in Belgium and the Netherlands.
Good news that a man suspected of being a significant supplier of small boat equipment has been arrested.
— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) November 14, 2024
I want to thank @NCA_UK and their Dutch and Belgian counterparts for their work on this investigation.
Our approach to smashing criminal gangs is already having an impact. pic.twitter.com/54OkF7mIJY
He now faces extradition to Belgium to face charges of being involved in human smuggling via the transit of boats and engines from Turkey to a storage unit in Germany and then on to northern France.
According to Starmer, the arrest shows the government’s focus on breaking the supply of boats is now ‘bearing fruit’.
The overall story of Labour’s approach to ending the illicit cross-Channel traffic has been one of predictable and lamentable failure
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper added that: ‘This major investigation shows how important it is for our crime fighting agencies to be working hand in glove with our international partners to get results.’
That the arrest of a single suspect has brought forth statements from both the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary perhaps indicates a certain sense of desperation to demonstrate some progress on this issue.
And no wonder. Because the overall story of Labour’s approach to ending the illicit cross-Channel traffic has been one of predictable and lamentable failure.
Starmer’s immediate scrapping, on taking office, of the nascent Rwanda deterrent plan has been followed by a big upsurge in illegal arrivals into the UK via the Channel. Between January 1 and July 4, under Rishi Sunak’s premiership, 13,574 people entered Britain in this fashion, at an average of 73 per day. But since Starmer took office, almost 20,000 have arrived at an average of 145 per day.
It has also just emerged that at least in some cases the migrants are being provided with healthcare as well as plush hotel accommodation and ultimately permanent social housing.
Yet still ministers refuse to acknowledge that the migrants themselves are usually enthusiastic participants in a criminal enterprise designed to help them gatecrash illegally into Britain and tap into its extensive taxpayer-funded welfare state.
Indeed, there is a strong case for saying that the migrants – typically young men paying £3,000 each for a place in one of the boats they help carry down to the waterfront in France – stand to gain at least as much financially over the long-term as do those arranging their dinghy berths.
Still Starmer and Cooper ask us to have faith that they can shut down the route by starving northern France of rubber dinghies, while running a free water taxi service into Dover for any that reach the mid-point of the Channel.
There is as much chance of that working as there is of the arrests of individual drug dealers ending the London cocaine trade.
Of course those making millions out of facilitating illegal immigration must be arrested, charged and then jailed upon conviction. It is important that they face at least some risk of an adverse outcome.
And yet there will always be someone new keen to step into the shoes of those apprehended so long as migrants with cash in their pockets are willing to pay big money. By failing ensure any deterrent exists in the minds of the migrants themselves, other than the still very small risk of drowning in the Channel, ministers are guaranteeing this problem is only going to get worse.
After seeing what failing to stop the boats did to the careers of his Tory predecessors, it must surely soon dawn on Starmer what failing to smash the gangs will do to his own.
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