Labour’s approach to tackling the small boats crisis is based around a dichotomy so overly simplistic that it should not fool even an averagely intelligent child. Keir Starmer set it out in an article for the Sun newspaper in July: the people in the boats are innocent victims, the people arranging for the boats to be there for them to get into at the appointed hour are evil and must be hunted down.
Starmer pledged to ‘smash the vile criminal gangs that profit from illegal immigration’. ‘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,’ he wrote.
Anything, but anything, is apparently more palatable to the Prime Minister than just admitting the truth
So there we had it: the smugglers were the ones breaching UK borders, while those paying them for a berth in a boat – mainly adult males actually – were absolved of any responsibility for actually being the ones immigrating illegally.
Sustaining this dichotomy is essential to Starmer for defending the ludicrous situation where illegal migrants are mainly put up in hotels and houses rather than in secure accommodation and not swiftly removed from the UK mainland to some willing country such as Rwanda or to a British overseas territory. They are the victims, you see, and that is that.
This obvious lie was dealt a further blow yesterday, no doubt inadvertently, by the head of operations at the National Crime Agency, a chap called Rob Jones. Jones told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that tackling the small boats traffic was harder than fighting drug smuggling.
One reason for this, he said, was the use of an ancient and informal money exchange system known as ‘hawala’ that makes it harder for the authorities to track the gangs via their financial transactions:
The money model utilises hawala, which is a model based on trust and informality and that means we don’t have large amounts of cash moving between borders or even electronically like we do with the drug trade.
Ah. So the payment model from the migrants to their boat providers relies on ‘trust’ between the two sides. Does this not imply to you deep links and kinship ties between the two sets of people and the active participation of UK-based diaspora populations? Because it certainly does to me. The term hawala, by the way, is said to derive from the Arabic word for ‘transfer’.
Starmer though now seems set on deploying a hawala model of his own: paying other countries large sums of British taxpayers’ money while trusting that they will use this funding to stem the illegal flow of people into the UK.
It didn’t work for Rishi Sunak in the case of France, but Starmer now intends to expand the idea to Vietnam, Turkey and Iraq. Downing Street told journalists that the money could be used by countries to support local border staff in identifying illicit travel as well as paying for information campaigns warning of the risks of trying to come to the UK.
Anything, but anything, is apparently more palatable to the Prime Minister than just admitting the truth: that by far the majority of the criminal acts associated with the small boats racket are carried out by those stepping into boats on the coast of France and out of them at Dover. This is a demand-led business model.
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