The shiny new Downing Street operation that has come into being since the departure of Sue Gray has decreed that this is going to be ‘small boats week’. They have created a media grid with the aim of promoting the idea of Keir Starmer as a strong and authoritative leader busily coordinating measures to accelerate Labour’s plan to ‘smash the gangs’.
Rather comically, the Sun newspaper was briefed that Starmer will declare the border crisis a ‘national security issue’, announce a crack new team of investigators, hold talks with Giorgia Meloni and vow to end ‘gimmicks’. So that’s three gimmicks followed by a promise not to indulge in gimmicks. It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.
The tectonic plates of British politics are on the move
None of Starmer’s activity addresses the key driver of the illicit Channel traffic: the fact that people who illegally gatecrash their way into our country are rarely detained in jail-like conditions and almost never removed. Instead, the bulk are put up in hotels, given spending money, allowed to come and go as they please and thus able to work in the cash-in-hand economy. Ultimately they can expect to win formal permission to stay and unlock for themselves permanent access to the British welfare state and possibly the right to bring family members to join them. Such access for a young man could easily be worth £1 million over a lifetime – truly a golden ticket.
Yet Starmer and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper continue to peddle an approach to the issue which focuses exclusively on an alleged mission to destroy the very profitable people-moving gangs: all of them. The purported aim is to make sure there are no rubber dinghies available to take illegal migrants across the Channel (or more precisely, take migrants to the mid-point of the Channel from where UK Border Force or RNLI vessels provide a water taxi service into Dover).
Unsurprisingly the strategy has yet to bear any fruit: no gang has been smashed. The numbers crossing have accelerated upwards too since Starmer and Cooper took over and pulled the plug on the Rwanda removals policy, having connived in its frustration for the previous two years. The BBC today reports that in October alone there were more than 5,000 arrivals,
Yet for Starmer and Cooper it is an unconscionable sin to acknowledge that the migrants themselves have agency and are the key drivers of this trade. When he came into office in July, the Prime Minister wrote that: ‘Every week vulnerable people are overloaded onto boats on the coast of France. Infants, children, pregnant mothers – the smugglers do not care.’ The reality is that 80 per cent are young men typically paying £3,000 a pop and helping to carry the boats down beaches to the water’s edge.
But still, the policy of zero deterrence and an exclusive focus on ending the supply of boats continues. Today, Starmer announced a doubling of the budget of his new Border Security Command to £150 million – an unprecedented investment in gold braid and epaulettes that may at least be of some benefit to the British textiles industry.
Perhaps, sooner or later, a gang or two will be ‘smashed’ and Starmer will excitedly dash down to Border Security Command HQ to celebrate. But what will happen then? Anyone with a basic knowledge of economics will understand that a temporary downturn in the supply of boats will lead to higher prices for a seat in a boat, making the remaining gangs even more profitable until new gangs are drawn into the trade. It’s a demand-driven business.
One Channel migrant is currently on a murder charge in a Midlands town. Not much has been written about it. Public anger locally largely remains below the surface – a result of Starmer’s summer law and order crackdown against ‘Far Right’ agitators, no doubt. British nationals are deemed to have agency you see, even when driven half-mad with grief about the killing of compatriots.
Yet the tectonic plates of British politics are on the move. Reform’s MPs continue to highlight what they term an ‘invasion’; the Tories finally have a new leader ready to go for the throat of ‘Two Tier Keir’. The Starmer shtick – a former DPP with Action Man hair launching a never-ending stream of securocrat gimmicks – is already wearing very thin. The truth cannot be hidden from people for much longer: it is the ideological weirdness of the British left, embodied by Starmer, which facilitates the gatecrashing of our borders by ruthless and undocumented young men from other cultures.
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