I’ve seen the small boats crisis first-hand - Starmer’s crackdown is making it worse

7 April 2025, 11:53

By Nicola Kelly

Last week Keir Starmer held yet another summit for world leaders, this time focused on ‘organised immigration crime’.

The gathering came at a time of particular scrutiny. Just days earlier, figures emerged showing that more than 6,000 people have crossed the Channel by small boat this year: a new record high.

Decisive action was required, the prime minister warned the forty leaders gathered before him. Hard-working people and vulnerable migrants were being exploited. Though he didn't say it, Starmer, too, was being made to look incompetent. The Labour government had, after all, swept to power on the promise of change. Yet here were overcrowded dinghies arriving on Britain’s shores in numbers never seen before.

I have spent much of the last five years on the frontline of the small boats crisis researching my book, ‘Anywhere But Here’, and I’ve seen where governments consistently go wrong. Labour’s fixation on enforcement is one such strategy- a misplaced, misguided focus which has not, and will not, work.

In October 2024, I stood on a beach in Dunkirk, watching as over sixty people made their way towards a dinghy bound for Britain. Among the group was a heavily pregnant woman and a boy as young as three - my son’s age - padding hurriedly across the sand. On the horizon, I could just about see the undulating land ahead: Britain. Thousands of miles, largely travelled on foot. The final destination for the group was in sight.

Nearby were the beach patrol officers, funded by the British government: retired, baton-wielding gendarmes police, paid to race towards groups like this, puncturing their boats before they set sail.

Round the coastline, several other boats were launching at the same time. Many had been pushed further away by the beach patrols, as far down as Normandy. Some migrants were now being forced to wade out into the water to reach the ‘taxi boats’ hovering in the water, while others attempted to board in canals and estuaries. Their bodies were invariably found on the banks nearby, some of the 78 people who died last year in the Channel, the highest number on record.

Meanwhile, to outwit law enforcement, smugglers pack more people onboard. Sometimes as many as ninety or even a hundred people have been rescued by the Border Force or the RNLI once they’ve crossed into British waters. Little wonder, then, that the number of deaths in the Channel has spiked over the last year. If this picture sounds particularly bleak, then the reality on the ground is even bleaker.

Every day we see headlines splashed across the tabloids and hear bulletins on the broadcast news about the numbers making the crossing. The Labour government, as with all successive governments, responds by throwing money at the problem. Half a billion pounds to the French for patrol teams, sniffer dogs, night-vision equipment. Over a billion pounds of taxpayers’ money for surveillance technologies. A hundred new intelligence operatives to weed out the smuggling kingpins. But the customers keep coming and the gangs keep proliferating.

While enforcement pushes more people into each boat and further round the coastline to their deaths, externalisation, too, is a strategy favoured by Labour which is doomed to fail. We have seen it with Australia, and we’ve seen it with Italy’s Albania deal, and most recently, we saw the Conservative party’s unworkable Rwanda deal consigned to the scrap heap.

These plans are costly - Rwanda cost the British taxpayer £700 million - and they are deadly. They also rarely get off the ground because they are usually found to be unlawful and mired in legal challenges. Arbitrary detention and human rights abuses are common.

A far better approach than enforcement and externalisation is to rebuild resettlement and family reunion routes. It would mean investing in schemes that stand a chance of working rather than pouring millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money into performative politics. That might not be palatable to ministers or provide enough of a challenge to Reform as it surges in the polls, but it is the only humane solution.

With increasing numbers attempting to cross and a spike in those losing their lives in our waters, now is the time for the government to heed those calls and rebuild influence on the world stage as a progressive, compassionate nation.

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Nicola Kelly is the author of ‘Anywhere But Here: How Britain’s Broken Asylum System Fails Us All’ (published by Elliott & Thompson), out now.

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