Britain's small boats obsession

New Statesman​

30-04-2025

Photo by Sameer Al-Doumy / AFP via Getty Images
Shortly before dawn on 23 April 2024, on the shores of a resort town perched on the northernmost corner of France, unexpected chaos broke out. From behind the sand dunes that run along the beach, a mass of people emerged running towards the water. Amid the rush, a group of young men dragged an inflatable dinghy alongside the growing swell of people, pulling the boat into the English Channel before it could be intercepted by the French policemen heading their way. Others in the group attempted to hold the authorities back, throwing fireworks at them and brandishing sticks to ward them off.
Once the boat was in the water, the people immediately began to scramble aboard, desperate to make the perilous 32km crossing to the UK. Within minutes, it was clear that the boat was over capacity. These dinghies – which typically measure around 11m long – are only designed to carry a maximum of 15 people. Sometimes the number of people attempting to board them to make the Channel crossing can be has high as 60, but on this particular morning, the number had surpassed 100. Even more besides had been pushed into the water and were clinging on to the side of the boat.
The French authorities stood on the shore watching the dinghy float out to sea. They are not allowed to follow those attempting to cross the Channel into the water and so were forced to stay put as this dangerous vessel drifted further away from the shore. Close by, watching this scene unfold, were members of the BBC's Home Affairs team, who had captured the scene on camera. It later emerged that five people onboard the vessel had died; two had drowned making the crossing, while three others were crushed in the turmoil. Among the dead was a seven-year-old girl.
Just hours earlier, the UK's controversial Rwanda Bill had finally become law, having made its way through the House of Commons. The new policy, which the former Conservative government had spent two long and turbulent years trying to implement, aimed to relocate illegal immigrants and asylum seekers from the UK to Rwanda for processing. It was dreamt up during Boris Johnson's administration, though neither he nor Liz Truss had successfully pushed the new policy through. But on 22 April, after the bill had finally passed, a triumphant Rishi Sunak declared 'nothing will stand in our way' when getting flights off the ground.
Back in northern France, the BBC spoke to migrants in the precarious camps which surround Calais who had already heard about the fatal incident that morning. When asked whether the Rwanda scheme would deter him from risking a small boat crossing, one Sudanese man said: 'Nothing can stop me.'
On the day that the Rwanda scheme was first announced, 14 April 2022, the journalist Nicola Kelly happened to be on the Kent coast with her husband and young son. Her professional instinct kicked in as she rushed to the beach at Folkestone to speak to arrivals. Kelly spoke to more than 40 people who had made the Channel crossing that day, arriving from Iran, Syria, Sudan, Eritrea and Iraqi Kurdistan. She found similar attitudes to those that would be heard by the BBC two years later. All of those Kelly spoke to had heard the news of the imminent deal between the UK and Rwanda; each one had braved the crossing anyway.
This and many other stories, gathered over five years of scrupulous reporting, have been distilled into Kelly's debut book, Anywhere But Here: How Britain's Asylum System Fails Us All. A former civil servant and diplomat, Kelly joined the Home Office as a press officer in 2014, just as it was rolling out the notorious hostile environment policy.
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The policy was announced by the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, in 2012 (who only ten years previously had criticised her own party for making 'political capital out of minorities') and came to define the UK's attitudes towards immigration during the 2010s. Its main aim was to discourage people from seeking to remain in the UK illegally by making it more difficult for them to access basic necessities.
As Kelly points out, the policy 'created an atmosphere of inherent suspicion and disbelief in which private landlords, NHS staff, teachers, DVLA administrators – anyone in a position of authority – was turned into a de facto border guard'. Some of those targeted (most famously, the Windrush generation, who were disproportionately affected) had been in the UK for years, having established families and careers.
It was a clear turning point in the UK's approach to immigration, and for Kelly's career in the civil service. After months waking up every day 'with a sense of dread' caused by the direction of travel in the department, she handed in her Home Office lanyard and switched to the side of the journalists, reporting on immigration and asylum for the Guardian and elsewhere. Many of Kelly's former colleagues became her sources, and her reporting is clearly enriched by her insider knowledge of how the Home Office operates.
The dysfunction and antagonism of Britain's immigration and asylum system has its roots in the hostile environment, but it is expressed through the UK's enduring political obsession with small boats. Since 2018, roughly 150,000 people have entered the UK via these dangerous, rudimentary means – the boats themselves have become totemic of Britain's conversations around immigration.
Sunak's pledge to 'stop the boats' dictated the final days of his premiership as he fought to do something (anything!) to reduce the number of people reaching UK shores via these means. And who can forget Suella Braverman's haunting photo op on a press trip to Rwanda in November 2023 (to which only right-leaning newspapers were invited), in which she looks gleeful, head thrown back in apparent laughter, excited by the prospect of delivering her government's fateful policy. Since Labour's victory at last year's general election, this has evolved to become Yvette Cooper's new mission to 'smash the gangs' – but the focus on small-boat crossings remains.
Anywhere But Here takes small boats as its focus, and throughout Kelly is deftly and equitably critical of the government's fixation with them at the expense of sensible and comprehensive immigration policies. But her writing expands further than Whitehall to tell the stories of those most affected by the government's rhetoric and its decision-making.
One story, told in snippets throughout the book, is of Parwen, an Iraqi-Kurdish mother of two who Kelly first met at a camp in Dunkirk in 2023. The pair swapped numbers, and Parwen kept Kelly abreast of her family's journey from Iraq via WhatsApp. It was treacherous: Parwen watched her mother drown attempting to make an earlier small-boat crossing from Turkey to Greece (a terrible reminder that these crossings are not limited to the English Channel), and once they reached northern France a canister of tear gas was released near her four-year-old son to deter them from setting up camp. Parwen's story is one of many sensitively relayed via Kelly's humane reporting.
Another is that of Barin, a Kurdish asylum seeker in his early twenties who, on 14 June 2022, was forced on to a plane destined for Rwanda. Unsure of where the officers who had picked him up from Brook House immigration removal centre were taking him, and with little understanding of English, Barin communicated with them via Google Translate. A high court order at the 11th hour stopped the plane from taking off. Through these stories, Kelly sensitively illustrates the end-point of policies devised in Whitehall.
Nicola Kelly writes early on: 'This book is not about policy, politics or politicking; it's about people.' But when confronted by the human consequences of initiatives designed to win votes in Westminster, it is hard not to read this without feeling a certain degree of rage that such inhumane actions are being taken in the name of the British taxpayer. Yet Kelly remains poised, articulate and informed by exhaustive knowledge. Above all, to read Anywhere But Here is to follow her in the search for justice.
Anywhere But Here: How Britain's Asylum System Fails Us All
Nicola Kelly
Elliott & Thompson, 320pp, £20
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[See also: The sounds that shape us]
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