CREDIT where it is due: congratulations are finally in order for Sir Keir Starmer. Despite an otherwise lacklustre ten months in government, the Prime Minister has at least hit one target ahead of schedule: the first 10,000 illegal immigrants of the year crossed the English Channel by the end of April – that’s a month early, and 40 per cent up on the same period in 2024.
Starmer of course cannot be made the scapegoat for illegal (or indeed mass) immigration. The baton was passed seamlessly all the way from Blair to Sunak, and utter incompetent though he may be, Sir Keir clearly has no intention of fumbling the transfer so close to the home straight.
Far from a sudden storm, the small boats crisis represents a near-decade-long erosion of will on the part of politicians charged with the nation’s defences. In 2018, just 299 illegals braved the Channel, a curiosity barely noted in Westminster watering holes. A year later, the figure was 1,843 – an increase that should have sounded alarm bells. Instead of action, successive governments dithered. The numbers tell the tale: 8,466 in 2020; 28,526 in 2021, and a staggering 45,755 in 2022, when 1,104 boats overwhelmed the hapless Border Force. In 2023, 29,437 crossed – a slight ebb but still a scandal, costing billions in hotel bills.
Having made it his first act to scrap the Rwanda scheme, the Conservatives’ imperfect but symbolic deterrent, Starmer has replaced it with Border Security Command – a cobbled-together fantasy of MI5, the National Crime Agency and Border Force synergy, which the PM claims will ‘treat people smugglers like terrorists’ (by which he presumably means ‘put them up in four-star hotels and ensure the menu is to their satisfaction’). Nonetheless in 2024, 36,816 illegals arrived, 23,000 of them during Starmer’s tenure from July to December, 29 per cent more than the equivalent period in 2023. Far from ‘smashing the gangs’, reaching 10,000 illegals in 2025 with such indecent speed is a monument to his failure.
Forgive my penchant for Greek mythology, but I imagine the migrant crisis as a multi-headed Hydra – a Herculean task that cannot be slain with half-measures. The beast’s heads are manifold: government complicity (it’s not mere incompetence when the errors only ever work in favour of those breaching our borders); an activist judiciary, with judges who support open borders and corrupt lawyers who help illegals game the asylum system; the French authorities, who are clearly not daft enough to do their job properly – particularly when the British are willing to bribe them to the tune of half a billion quid and don’t expect any results; the European Court of Human Rights, which prioritises the dietary proclivities of foreign criminals over the rights of their victims; the taxpayer-funded activists, thwarting attempts to stop the boats; the people smugglers, who are smart enough to offer easyJet-style discount seats; and the media, which invariably frames the 90 per cent male incursion into Britain as ‘a humanitarian puzzle’ rather than a national security threat. Each head feeds the others, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of failure.
Certainly, some of these factors are beyond the purview of Whitehall Mandarins. However, a large part of Britain’s inability to deal with the illegal Channel migrants resides in the attitude of the Home Office. Consider the determination of around half of Whitehall’s civil servants to work from home; the threats of mutiny Priti Patel faced over the ‘shameful’ Rwanda deportation policy; and the leaked report that classified concerns over two-tier policing as ‘right-wing extremism’, leading to claims that the Home Office is little more than a ‘left-wing think tank’.
Such inertia is echoed in every Whitehall communiqué. For instance, a Home Office spokesman recently opined: ‘We all want to end dangerous small boat crossings, which threaten lives and undermine our border security. The people-smuggling gangs do not care if the vulnerable people they exploit live or die, as long as they pay and we will stop at nothing to dismantle their business models and bring them to justice.’
This statement, while sounding resolute, betrays a fundamental misplacement of priorities. The focus remains on the safety and wellbeing of the migrants – those complicit in the illegal act of crossing – rather than the security of the British population whom the Home Office is meant to protect.
Neither is this a mere aberration lower down the chain of command. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill currently going through Parliament claims to ‘treat people-smugglers like terrorists’ via the enforcement of travel bans, social media blackouts and phone restrictions, all of which sounds remarkably similar to Labour’s restrictions on the under-16s. If all else fails, rumours are that Cooper intends to put the people-smugglers on the naughty step.
Worse still is the ideology behind the inertia. Despite ministers privately acknowledging that successfully tackling illegal immigration is pivotal to Labour’s credibility, Starmer, a human rights lawyer to his core, simply cannot bring himself to prioritise borders. His refusal to set migration caps reflects a worldview where sovereignty is negotiable. Meanwhile, Labour’s plans to fast-track asylum claims, meant to clear backlogs, has instead signalled to migrants: ‘Come, and you may stay’. The result is a 40 per cent surge in crossings, each dinghy a floating indictment of Labour’s moral vanity.
Multi-faceted the problem may be, but solutions are invariably simple – provided there is genuine will to enact them. A sensible, proud and patriotic British government ought to be doing the following:
- Deploy the Navy – properly, not as a taxi service. Turn the boats back like Australia did.
- Ditch the hand-wringing and pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights. It’s a straitjacket tying us to every sob story crossing the Channel.
- Deport anyone here illegally, no ifs, no buts – and that includes the estimated one in 12 illegal ‘Londoners’.
- Slash the pull factors. No hotels, no benefits, no ‘asylum’ for economic chancers – watch the queues vanish overnight.
The 10,000 crossings of 2025 are a symptom of a deeper rot: a nation unsure of its right to exist. Britain’s borders are not just geography, but the frontier of a culture: a history, a people. To surrender the borders is to surrender everything. Starmer’s Labour, with its platitudes and paralysis, offers no hope. But Britain is not doomed. She has faced graver threats in the past, and emerged stronger. And most likely, it is the common sense of the British people (rather than its representatives at Westminster) that will save her. The recent Reform UK earthquake in the local elections is indicative of a public that still believes in Britain, although its government clearly does not.
2029 is however, a long way off. And even if Nigel Farage finally gets his hand on the keys to Number 10, how many more boats will Starmer have ushered in during the interim?
This article appeared in TheFrank Report on May 21, 2025, and is republished by kind permission. (4) Britain’s Borderless Betrayal – by Frank Haviland
