Keir Starmer has repeatedly promised to smash the gangs to secure our borders. But the reality is rather different. Yesterday, the Prime Minister tweeted a short clip once again attempting to reassure British voters that the government is ‘going to the source to smash the people smuggling gangs’. The video is an odd, cheap thing. Set to possibly the most generic soundtrack available and voiced over by an utterly bored-sounding young man, it shows images of small boats full of migrants, foreign police, and open water. Eye-catchingly, it promises to reveal just ‘how we’re controlling our borders’. Unfortunately, almost every single claim it makes is misleading or laughable.
The narrator tells us that the government is ‘working with our international allies to smash people smuggling gangs for good’ and that ‘hundreds of boats and engines have been seized’. ‘Since July we have returned nearly 30,000 people with no right to be here,’ he continues. He goes on to announce that ‘we’re giving law enforcement new powers to criminalise those who endanger lives at sea’.
Perhaps the plan is not to do anything serious to stop illegal migration
The government may well have deported 30,000 people since they came to power last July, but over 38,000 migrants have arrived just via small boats since then. The flow of illegal arrivals is increasing, with almost 15,000 having made the trip so far this year, compared to 10,448 at this point in 2024. At the current rate we may well see 40,000 migrants illegally crossing the Channel in 2025. Based on recent years, we should expect 95 per cent of those arrivals to make a claim for asylum, around half of which will be successful. During their claim, each asylum seeker is estimated to cost at least £41,000 per year. On this basis, 2025’s arrivals will cost £1.5 billion per year.
And what about the gangs? Starmer may believe that his government is ‘ramping up our efforts to smash the gangs at their source’, but the reality is that people smugglers now seem to face very limited consequences for their actions. Just yesterday, two Afghan men were sentenced to eight months imprisonment for ‘facilitating illegal immigration to the UK’. On 21 May they piloted a small boat with over 70 migrants in it across the Channel. After they departed Calais, a French patrol craft intercepted them and found a woman and a child dead, but allowed the boat to continue its crossing. So the men were sentenced to eight months for bringing 70 illegal migrants to the country on a journey in which two died. Under the current sentencing regime, they will be released in a little over three months.
This sentence is shocking, but also seems to indicate a significant reduction in punishments for people smugglers. As I’ve written before, I know a man who ran a people smuggling operation. He brought migrants over four at a time in his boat. None ever died. He got eight years, not eight months. This sentence is no deterrent at all and will do nothing to ‘smash the gangs’.
The video insists, ‘OUR PLAN IS WORKING’. Perhaps the plan is not to do anything serious to stop illegal migration but to hope to make enough noise to con British voters. The gangs bring migrants over because migrants pay. Migrants pay because they know that once here, they will be able to make an asylum claim, receive housing and financial support while they wait for that claim to be processed and have about a 50 per cent chance of being allowed to remain in the UK.
The reality is that it is entirely possible to stop illegal migration, but it would require the UK to leave the ECHR and withdraw from the 1951 Refugee Convention. This would remove our legal obligations to allow asylum claims and allow us to immediately relocate all illegal arrivals to detention facilities pending repatriation. I do not believe that Labour has the political will to take such action, but without it they haven’t a single hope of controlling our borders.
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