Britain’s Labour government is determined to create the impression it is now doing the right thing on illegal migration—which it described as a priority ahead of the election—more than 100 days after being voted in. Officials are even said to have created “a media grid” to ensure its ‘successes’ stay in the limelight over the next week.
Prime minister Keir Starmer kicked this off on Monday, announcing a new team of gang-busting investigators, as well as powers for prosecutors to “deliver charging decisions more quickly on international organised crime cases.” Most importantly, he stressed that Labour’s approach would be free from “gimmicks.”
He did not, however, say exactly when and by how much Channel crossings will begin to fall. Starmer’s spokesman went only as far as to insist that “we obviously want to make progress as quickly as possible,” which is effectively meaningless.
And that is despite Starmer himself describing the smuggling gangs aiding illegal migration as a “national security threat,” echoing language used by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK just a few months ago.
So the language is in place, but the new measures themselves have been dismissed as a series of “gimmicks followed by a promise not to indulge in gimmicks.” Journalist Patrick O’Flynn wrote in The Spectator that “none of Starmer’s activity addresses the key driver of the illicit Channel traffic: the fact that people who illegally gatecrash their way into our country are rarely detained in jail-like conditions and almost never removed.”
Robert Bates, who is research director at the Centre for Migration Control think tank, also told this publication that “Britain has now become a case study of what happens when blinkered left-wing ideologues and humanitarians are given control during a crisis.”
They have scrapped a deterrent, rebooked hotel rooms, wasted millions on gimmicks and continental trips for themselves, and taken the British public for fools.
Today’s measures are the equivalent of throwing a thimbleful of water at a house fire. The problem will continue raging and the invasion will only gather more steam.
More than 17,000 migrants have already illegally crossed the Channel to Britain under Starmer’s watch. And a recent contract offer from the Home Office strongly suggested that the Labour government itself expects crossings to continue potentially until 2036.
