The migrant mega-dinghy is a national humiliation

It looks like Andy Burnham has achieved what his predecessors could not. He has found a solution to the small-boats crisis…

In the early hours of Monday morning, a 49-foot dinghy carrying 230 illegal immigrants arrived on British shores from France. It is by some margin the largest number of migrants to have arrived in a single vessel. It surpasses by far the previous record of 165, a feat of human trafficking achieved late last month. As many people have already pointed out, the ‘small boats crisis’ may now technically be over, as we enter the era of migrant cruise-liners.

The British media are deriving some morbid enjoyment from the scale of the vessel and the sheer number of passengers. The Sun informs readers 230 people is more than an average EasyJet flight can carry. The Daily Mail tells us that 230 passengers would exceed the capacity of a Boeing 737. In length, the boat is 10 feet longer than an average double-decker bus.

Reports suggest the immediate cost to the British taxpayer of the ‘mega-dinghy’ alone will be roughly £25million. Admittedly, this is a drop in the ocean to the nearly £3 billion the government is already spending each year housing illegal immigrants across Britain. But it is money the government does not have, spent on people who have no right to be here.

The mega-dinghy also makes a mockery of the various deals the Labour government has made with France – the latest of which, signed in April, resulted in the UK agreeing to cough up £662million over three years to stop illegal immigrants departing from French shores. One year on from Keir Starmer’s vaunted ‘one-in, one-out’ deal with French president Emmanuel Macron, just four per cent of illegal immigrants have been returned. Time and again, footage from the French coast reveals that French police and border patrol have absolutely no interest in preventing illegal immigrants leaving for the UK.

This isn’t simply a national humiliation – a dereliction of the government’s fundamental duty to protect our nation’s borders. It is a moral failure, too. We cannot be certain – largely because the government refuses to publish the relevant statistics – but it is surely not hyperbole to state that some of the men who arrived on Monday will go on to commit serious offences. What we can say without doubt is that many of the arrivals will disappear into the UK’s grey economy, and none of them will be deported.

Unfortunately for Burnham, the central government’s authority over the UK’s border is one power he can’t devolve. The responsibility for Monday’s record-breaking berth rests squarely with his administration. And, despite standing on the Dover coastline little more than a week ago, promising to be ‘relentless’ in curbing Channel crossings, it is a challenge he looks just as unable to meet as his predecessors were. Already, more than 3,000 illegal immigrants have crossed the Channel since he was handed the top job, a position he has held for less than a month.

For all his talk about capping bus fares and ending hard-to-cancel subscriptions, Andy Burnham will soon discover that these issues pale into insignificance set against illegal immigration. Poll after poll proves that it is the central, blazing problem the public wants fixed – and it will incinerate Burnham’s career unless he gets to grips with it.

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.