We are approaching the fifth anniversary of British prime ministers promising to stem the tide of illegal migration across the English Channel. It was in late August 2019 that Boris Johnson did a piece to camera in which he warned potential new waves of illegal immigrants: ‘We will send you back.’ In the event, hardly anyone got sent back anywhere.
Next up was Rishi Sunak, who hyped up the Rwanda removals plan that he had sought to block on value for money grounds when Johnson first proposed it. Sunak promised nothing less than to ‘stop the boats’ via the creation of the Rwanda deterrent. The boats were not stopped. In fact, Sunak left office with cross-Channel arrivals having hit a new record rate. And nobody at all was removed to Rwanda against their will.
There is no sign of any gangs being smashed
These days Keir Starmer and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper have a new chosen soundbite: ‘Smash the gangs.’ Needless to say, there is no sign of any gangs being smashed and Channel migrant arrivals have further escalated since Labour took power. On Sunday alone, some 703 made it to the English coast, while two people drowned inside French waters as they were heading our way.
The idea behind ‘smash the gangs’ is that people paying several thousand pounds for a berth in a dinghy are not themselves ruthless gatecrashers into Britain, but mere victims of trafficking with no agency or culpability of their own. As Starmer wrote in the Sun last month: ‘Every week vulnerable people are overloaded onto boats on the coast of France. Infants, children, pregnant mothers – the smugglers do not care. They’re making a fortune, breaching our borders.’
In fact, more than 80 per cent of the people getting escorted into Dover from the mid-way point in the Channel are men. But Starmer is right about the fortune being made by the people-moving syndicates. So right in fact as to render his approach conceptually useless: if and when any gangs do get smashed, the supply of places in boats will become constrained, the price of places in boats will rise and new gangs will stampede to exploit the gap in the market and the even higher profit margins available.
And yet, gangs making perhaps £3,000 on every transported migrant are not the biggest financial gainers in this ugly and illicit trade. The migrants themselves are. More than three-quarters of them can expect to be given some sort of leave to remain in the UK, while many are from countries to which we simply can’t remove them anyway.
From the word go they have accommodation, meals, healthcare, dentistry and pocket money provided for free, while there is also still plenty of cash-in-hand work to be had in our informal economy. Once they have established a right to stay in Britain then the British welfare state becomes wide open.
Social housing, education for children able to join them, full access to the NHS, out-of-work benefits, you name it. In effect, it is open sesame to a British ‘social wage’, worth perhaps £20,000 a year – a million-pound lifetime prize for those coming in young. Even accounting for the future tax contributions of those who do go on to gain legitimate employment, this still leaves a big six figure lifetime bill. Former immigration minister Robert Jenrick quoted an estimate of £400,000 per person yesterday. In comparison, the upfront investment of a couple of thousand quid to a people-moving gang seems like the bargain of the century.
The British public knows all this. The social contract that sees people pay into a common pot to earn the right to a safety net when tough times hit has been smashed by the rapidly escalating scale of foreign national free-riding that is being permitted.
Johnson didn’t send the migrants back, Sunak didn’t stop the boats and Starmer, who has already promised he will never take Britain out of the ECHR, will not be able to smash the gangs. In any event, any networks his new Border Security Command does break up in a blaze of gold braid and epaulettes will be replaced by new ones very swiftly.
That voters should be asked to place their trust in charade after charade is monstrous, infuriating and – after 132,000 nautical gatecrashers since 2018 so far and no sign of any abatement – very, very boring.
Comments