Labour’s crackdown on people smugglers comes as New Year’s Day Home Office figures show the number of small boats crossing the English Channel increased by a quarter on 2023. A staggering 36,816 people were recorded as having made the journey on small boats in 2024, with the last group of just under 300 people arriving on 29 December. Good heavens…
The figures reveal a 25 per cent increase on the previous year, in which 29,437 people took on the Channel to get to the UK – although 2022 remains the busiest year on record, with a whopping 45,774 arrivals onto British shores. In fact, the latest figures take the total number of people crossing the Channel in small boats since 2018 to more than 150,000. Crikey.
The stats coincide with the Home Office’s announcement that tougher sanctions will be applied to suspected people smugglers as part of Sir Keir Starmer’s plan to ‘smash the gangs’. Powers will be given to law enforcement to place restrictions on suspected traffickers before they are arrested, with sanctions set to include the freezing of assets, social media blackouts and travel bans – while Politico reports that ‘closer data sharing’ with European countries will be used to help build cases against criminals. And it’s not just small boat gangs in the firing line: those suspected of terrorism, drug trafficking and money laundering offences will also be targeted.
The announcement hasn’t satisfied everyone that Starmer’s army knows how to stop the boats, however, with opposition politicians calling for the return of a Rwanda-esque deterrent. Shadow home secretary Chris Philp raged that ‘Labour voted against higher sentences for these very same smuggling gangs in the last parliament’, while David Davis MP slammed the new measures as sounding ‘unnecessarily draconian’. Ouch.
Will Labour’s new legislation prove successful in suppressing the smugglers or, as the Tories insist, is a harsher deterrent needed? Time will tell…
Comments