Since the left-wing Labour Party government of Sir Kier Starmer came into power in July, more than 10,000 illegal migrants have reached British shores after crossing the English Channel from France.
Despite promises from Prime Minister Starmer to put an end to the boat migrant crisis in the Channel, 10,024 illegals have been recorded as successfully reaching the UK in people smuggler-operated boats launched from the French coastline since Labour’s victory at the July 4th general election.
The milestone was surpassed as 65 more aliens crossed the busy waterway on Monday, taking the total for the year to an estimated 23,598, according to calculations from the PA News agency, putting this year roughly on par with 2023 when 23,940 crossed the Channel at this point of the year.
The latest illegal crossings come in the wake of yet another tragedy, in which eight migrants drowned to death over the weekend after their flimsy rubber dinghy was ripped apart mid-Channel. A further six, including a 10-month-old baby, were hospitalised as a result of the incident.
This was less than two weeks after another migrant boat capsized, leaving 12 people, including six children and a pregnant woman dead.
The new left-wing government has pinned its hopes of confronting the crisis on further investment in policing operations targeted at human trafficking networks operating on both sides of the Channel.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced over the weekend that £75 million would be redirected from the scrapped Tory scheme to send illegals to Rwanda to invest in the number of border security officers.
Despite abandoning the Rwanda plan, and the hundreds of millions sent to Kigali along with it, during a diplomatic and fact-finding mission to Rome this week, Prime Minsiter Keir Starmer was said to be “very interested” in a similar scheme set to be enacted by the conservative government of Giorgia Meloni to send illegals to Albania to have their asylum claims processed.
The suggestion that the UK could follow Italy in sending boat migrants to Albania has ruffled feathers pro-mass migration elements of Starmer’s back bench, with MPs lambasting the government for seeking advice from what they termed as the “far-right” government of Meloni. This year, the Italian leader’s efforts to reduce illegal migration have resulted in over a sixty per cent decline in illegal alien arrivals.
Whether or not London will seek to join the Albania scheme remains to be seen and critics on the populist right have argued that the only way to meaningfully confront the crisis would be to leave the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and immediately return boat migrants back to the beaches of France, rather than having the British Border Force ferry them onto UK soil, as is the case now.
Commenting on the issue, Reform UK Member of Parliament Rupert Lowe told TalkTv on Monday: “The quickest way to save lives is to
have a zero-tolerance policy as the Australians did, to return people immediately, to make it quite clear that if you come illegally you will never ever settle here legally.”
As we know most of these are young men, 87 per cent of them I think by the Home Office’s own figures are young men, it’s not as if it’s families or you know people that are fleeing war-torn areas. They’re not, they’re coming through safe countries, so these are economic migrants and we are a soft touch. I think it is solvable, but we need the will to solve it.”
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