After overseeing months of thousands more illegal boat migrants landing on British beaches, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced that his government would throw more money at the problem, committing an additional £75 million to various initiatives, none of which include sending the boats back to France.
With weather conditions soon to take the migrant crisis off the front pages as the Channel becomes mostly unnavigable during the winter months, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer laid out his left-wing Labour Party government’s plans to confront the issue of people-smuggling networks mainly sending young men in small rubber dinghies from the coasts of Calais to Dover.
Rather than simply returning the boats to whence they came — as was successfully done by the Australian government’s Operation Sovereign Borders of former Prime Minister Tony Abbott — former prosecutor Starmer intends to use lawfare against trafficking networks to disrupt the flow of illegals.
The leftist prime minister did ramp up his rhetoric on Monday as he embarks upon a week-long push to highlight his supposed commitment to border security, however, telling the Interpol general assembly in Glasgow that people smuggling gangs should be treated as a “security threat similar to terrorism”. The model of spending one week of media appearances to give the impression the government is giving lots of attention to a policy area popular with the public is by no means novel, and was a real feature of the previous Conservative government.
“We’ve got to combine resources, share intelligence and tactics and tackle the problem upstream, working together to shut down the smuggling routes. We do that with terrorism,” Starmer said this morning, according to The Guardian.
“When I was the director of public prosecutions, it was my personal mission to smash the terrorist gangs, and we worked across borders to ensure the safety of citizens across Europe and across the world… Now, as the UK’s prime minister, it is my personal mission to smash the people smuggling gangs,” Starmer vowed.
According to The Times, the £75 million funding package will beef up Starmer’s Border Security Command (BSC) funding, taking the total investment into the project to £150 million. The taxpayer funds will be directed to pay for stepped-up enforcement, surveillance, and new maritime drones to monitor people smuggling networks operating along the French coastline.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) will also be given an additional £500,000 this year to pay for extra prosecutors devoted to people smuggling cases. The government will also seek to streamline decisions in trafficking cases through British courts, similar to its quick clampdown on those involved in anti-mass migration protests and riots over the summer, with the hopes of quick justice acting as a deterrent.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper — a ‘Refugees Welcome Here’ advocate — hailed the plans, writing in The Telegraph: “The best way to strengthen Britain’s border security is to work with neighbouring countries who face the same challenges, not to just stand on the shoreline shouting at the sea. To make us all safer, it’s time to recognise domestic security and global security are two sides of the same coin.”
However, some have questioned the strategy, including Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice, who noted Monday that efforts to target criminal drug gangs have failed to end the “money-infested drugs trade, nor will it with the boat gangs.”
The Starmer government has also faced criticism for immediately scrapping the scheme to send illegals to asylum processing centres in Rwanda upon coming into office, as well as the steadfast refusal to leave the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), which is frequently used by lawyers in Britain to block deportations.
Despite vowing to “smash the gangs”, the migrant crisis has continued unabated since Starmer came into power in July, with over 17,000 illegals landing on UK soil during the first four months of his administration, up from around 15,000 during the same time period last year. Since the start of the year, there have been 31,094 recorded illegal crossings.
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