ONE reason I started writing this newsletter Matt Goodwin | Substack is so we could share information and data people might have missed but really need to know. Here are two things that caught my eye over the last few days, which I think you really need to know:
Firstly, in the UK, the number of illegal migrants and small boats entering the country is rapidly spiralling, fuelling the immigration crisis and a broader collapse of public trust in the established parties and, for that matter, the entire system.
On the last Saturday of May alone, some 1,195 illegal migrants entered the UK on 19 small boats. This is the largest number for a single day this year, the fourth-largest on record since the border crisis began, and means that the overall number this year, nearly 15,000 illegal migrants, is some 42 per cent higher than the same point last year.
While immigration is already the number-one issue in British politics, and is the main reason why millions of voters are abandoning the established parties for Reform, the numbers now look set to spiral even higher, with the Times forecasting that around 50,000 migrants will arrive this year, a new annual record.
None of this will surprise longer-term readers, of course. Even before Labour came to power, in May 2024, we explained why its plan for ‘smashing the gangs’ would not work and the crisis would get worse. This is now happening.
Astonishingly, while Sir Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper continue to gaslight the country by claiming they are ‘regaining control’, even respected Labour Ministers such as John Healey are now openly conceding ‘Britain has lost control of its own borders’.
Look, too, at the declining number of small boats the French are intercepting – 47 per cent in 2023, 45 per cent in 2024, and 38 per cent so far this year. The numbers are going the wrong way despite the UK paying France £500million to stop the boats.
As if all this wasn’t bad enough, last weekend we learned that while nine European states are pushing to reform the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – Italy, Denmark, Austria, Belgium, Poland, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – Britain is not among them.
Britain, in other words, is showing little serious interest in doing the one thing that could make a difference to controlling our borders and deporting foreign criminals.
We simply cannot resolve this crisis unless we leave the ECHR and radically reform, if not repeal, Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act which enshrines the ECHR into UK law.
Despite Starmer and Cooper talking the talk about wanting to reform the ECHR to make it easier to control our borders and deport foreign criminals, they are not walking the walk. Far from it.
In fact, the very people who should be leading this debate, such as the key Starmer ally and Attorney General Lord Hermer, appear to be spending more time comparing people who do want to reform or leave the ECHR to Nazis, which is far from helpful.
Secondly, and just as shockingly, we have discovered that the hardworking, law-abiding British people are paying £1billion a month in welfare payments to households that contain at least one foreign national, an increase of 30 per cent on last year.
Nearly one in six Universal Credit payments are going to households with at least one foreign national. Put differently, the amount the Labour government ‘saved’ by axing winter fuel payments for Britain’s pensioners, £1.5billion, is now gone in just two months of funding benefits for households with foreign nationals.
Take a look at the overall trend. Like the small boat numbers, this too is soaring:
Data obtained and shared by the Telegraph
Who shared this data, you might ask? Was it the UK state being open and transparent with taxpayers and citizens? Have Keir Starmer and the Labour government suddenly decided to be honest with the British people?
Nope. Once again, this information had to be forced out of the state through Freedom of Information requests because the state is unwilling to share it. In fact, even now the state is refusing to release a whole tranche of information about how much UK taxpayers are having to pay on benefits for people from outside the UK.
It really is outrageous. As I’ve said before, you can’t accuse voters of ‘misinformation’ while simultaneously hiding information from them. And you cannot force them to live through the worst cost-of-living crisis since the Second World War while at the same time refusing to tell them how their own money is being spent.
For all these reasons – the surging number of small boats, the sense that nobody in Westminster is doing anything about the intensifying border crisis, and the fact that hardworking, tax-paying British people are now having to pay billions each year in welfare benefits to people who often do not even come from this country – the public mood in the UK is darkening and there is a creeping sense among many people that things are now spiralling out of control.
Just look, for example, at one last number that was released over the weekend. When pollsters YouGov asked the British people who they now trust to manage the asylum and immigration crisis, just 17 per cent backed the two big parties. Just think about that. Not even one in five British people is currently backing either Labour or the Tories on what they say is also the most important issue facing their country.
So who are they backing? While 34 per cent say they don’t know who to back or ‘none of them’, an even larger number, 37 per cent, now say they think Reform UK is best managed to handle immigration.
Therein lies the key dynamic that is reshaping British politics right now: the more and more that people sense things are spiralling out of control, which they clearly are, the more and more they are rejecting the established parties and turning to the one party that is calling for a radical change to the broken status quo.
This article appeared in Matt Goodwin on June 2, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
