Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s think tank published a new strategy document to deal with ‘small boat’ crossings into the UK, it was announced on Monday August 18.
The headline grabbing part was the use of ‘honeytraps’—secret agents capable of seducing gang leaders with pre-arranged stings. The ‘logic’ behind this strategy—part erotica, part pulp fiction—is that over time, the gang bosses would not know who they could trust. In turn, this would ‘Stop the Boats’ or ‘Smash the Gangs,’ according to the preferred cliches of Blair’s successors.
In addition to the raunchy bit, we find additional proposals to
- Use hacking and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in a “tech-powered offensive” to infiltrate the gangs;
- Create a new international alliance, similar to the Five Eyes intelligence agency (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the U.S,) to confront people smuggling;
- Gather intelligence on people smugglers’ operations by ‘catfishing,’ creating multiple “fake” social media profiles of migrants;
- Expand the sanctions regime against named people smugglers, announced last month by Foreign Secretary David Lammy;
- Use the online tactics of private fraud investigators against trafficking gangs.
The think tank appears short on suggestions of who is going to pay for it all. Alexander Iosad, director of government innovation policy at the Institute, declared:
It is time for a new mindset: one that treats data and computing power as strategic assets, accepts disruption as vital tools, and is willing to experiment with new institutional models that break with convention.
The fantasy policy proposals arrived shortly after it was established that 50,000 migrants had illegally crossed the channel under Keir Starmer—a worse performance than that of any of his predecessors Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson (and Tony Blair).
