It’s been a busy Christmas in the English Channel. The small boat arrivals have continued at a startling pace through the start of winter.
Nigel Farage is nonetheless a credible champion for the wronged masses
There were 451 arrivals on Christmas Day, 407 on Boxing Day, 305 on Friday and 322 on Saturday. Yesterday we know at least three more people drowned in the Channel near the coast of France, taking the number of migrants who have died or gone missing attempting the crossing this year to at least 77.
As the Mayor of Sangatte, Guy Allemend, told the French news agency AFP: ‘It’s crossing after crossing, without any let-up.’
And unless there is a sudden, total let-up, then Labour will end the year having presided over more than 23,000 illegal arrivals during the half of it they have spent in power. Pro-rata, they have taken us right back up to the peak flow of 2022, when just under 46,000 made the crossing.
It has not been so much a case of Keir Starmer ‘smashing the gangs’ as of the gangs smashing Keir Starmer. Indeed, so threadbare is the Prime Minister’s deterrent-free approach to the issue that he held a special press conference last month just to celebrate the arrest of one Turkish rubber dinghy salesman at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam.
The best social media joke of the season was from a poster on X who yesterday put out spoof ‘breaking news’ claiming: ‘Keir Starmer has asked “The Gangs” to come up with ideas on how they can smash themselves.’
Starmer has told the British public the third ‘big lie’ in a row from a sitting PM about this issue. Before his pledge to smash the gangs, Rishi Sunak pledged to ‘stop the boats’. And didn’t. Before that, Boris Johnson told people who used dinghies to gatecrash Britain ‘we will send you back’. And didn’t.
Given the potency of this issue and its shattering impact on the social contract, in my book this merits the term ‘flagship lying’. Why does Starmer believe his flagship lie will go any better than those of his Tory predecessors?
Hard-pressed taxpayers can see that the welfare state their taxes fund has been thrown wide open to bad faith, non-compatriot freeloaders. Brits freeze to death on the streets while cynical foreign nationals – many young men – who illegally breached our borders are put up free of charge in centrally-heated hotels. In some cases they have special healthcare provision on tap too – this in an era of record NHS waiting lists for the rest of us.
Sunak was wrong to think that public outrage over immigration policy was directed almost entirely at the level of illegal immigration. The socially corrosive and unmandated mega levels of legal immigration were also a cause of popular fury.
Yet there is something uniquely insulting about the public authorities tolerating and then over-indulging vast numbers of gatecrashers. It’s a basic breach of contract on the part of the governing class towards the governed – akin to forking out a fortune for a ticket to Glastonbury and then seeing stewards create a special hole in the fence especially for freeloaders who are then escorted to the ‘glamping’ section and given free backstage passes.
This is crisis is powering the Reform party. Both our traditional parties of government have presided over catastrophic system failure. Ironically, Reform’s anti-small boats policy is notably threadbare, containing no provision for overseas holding centres for illegal migrants who cannot be returned to their countries of origin or embarkation.
But Nigel Farage is nonetheless a credible champion for the wronged masses of the British public – someone who has for decades braved establishment brickbats to highlight the downsides of uncontrolled immigration.
By way of contrast: Boris Johnson didn’t send them back, Rishi Sunak didn’t stop the boats, Keir Starmer didn’t smash the gangs.
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