The number of illegal boat migrants that have crossed the English Channel since the Labour Party came into power has surpassed 20,000, despite promises from the fledgling government to crack down on the people smuggling trade.
According to calculations from Sky News, since Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party came into power on July 4th, a total of 20,110 illegal aliens have landed on British soil after crossing the Channel from migrant camps in France.
The broadcaster reported that the number of crossings since Labour won the election were 15 per cent higher than during the same time period last year when the Tory party was in power.
The Home Office, the department tasked with controlling the nation’s borders, claimed that the increase in illegal migrants reaching the country was merely a result of the weather.
In leaked analysis to the Labour-friendly Guardian newspaper, Home Office sources claimed that a 31-day period between October and November had the highest ratio of calm days on the English Channel since the government began tracking such statistics in 2018.
The so-called “red days” make it easier for people smuggling networks to send migrants in often flimsy dinghies across the perilous waterway. The paper claimed that according to the Home Office analysis, during the 31 days this year, 6,288 aliens crossed the Channel, compared to 768 during the same time in 2023.
However, regardless of weather conditions, the upsurge in illegal crossings of the Channel will likely serve as another blow for the struggling government of Prime Minister Starmer, who vowed to crack down on illegal migration, mostly through using legal means to target human trafficking networks.
The government is expected to lay out this week a series of further plans to tackle the issue, however, it is not expected to include measures such as simply sending illegals back to France, a safe, first-world country, where by international law, they should remain.
While the illegal migrant crisis places serious strain on public resources and government time, the more pressing migrant crisis is perhaps that of legal migration into Britain, with net migration hitting nearly one million last year.
In a speech last week Prime Minister Starmer claimed that the “open borders experiment” had been a “failure” and that it had been imposed upon the country by “design”.
Although the PM attempted to shift the blame onto Brexit — a vote supported by the public in large party out of desire to see migration reduced — given that his neo-liberal predecessors Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak refused to cap annual immigration, the process of opening Britain’s borders began in earnest under the Labour administration of Tony Blair.
Starmer said in his speech that his government will “turn the page” from the open borders agenda. However, like Johnson and Sunak before him, his government has so far ruled out committing to an annual cap on the number of foreigners allowed into the country.
Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden Pat McFadden said on Sunday that the government will roll out a new strategy to deal with both illegal and legal immigration. Yet, he said that Britain “will always need migration” and refused to even give a “target number” for the number of people allowed in per year.
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