The small boats crisis is getting worse. What's Labour's plan?
Yvette Cooper, then the chair of the Commons home affairs select committee, demanded action. 'There is a real risk of tragedy if urgent action isn't taken,' she said. 'The British and French authorities have known for some time about the risks posed by criminal gangs of people smugglers along the coast…much more coordinated French and British action is needed to tackle them.'
Six and a half years later, Cooper is the Home Secretary in a government that is breaking records for illegal arrivals. 50,000 have crossed the Channel in small boats in the 13 months since Keir Starmer took office. More than 27,000 migrants have crossed the Channel so far this year, up from 18,342 for the same period in 2024. According to the figures from Frontex, the EU's border agency, 41,800 'attempts' to reach England were made in the first seven months of 2025, a leap of 26 per cent on the previous year.
In other words, about 14,000 'attempts' to cross the Channel have failed for various reasons. Not that this will deter the migrants. The countries most heavily represented in the arrivals in England are Afghanistan, Somalia and Eritrea. These people aren't going to give up and head home to their war-torn countries. They will keep on trying.
The cynic might reflect that the determination of the migrants to reach England is in inverse proportion to the determination of the British government to keep them out.
This determination to cross the Channel is becoming ever more ferocious. Police reinforcements have been sent to the Channel town of Gravelines between Calais and Dunkirk after a weekend of violent disorder. According to the French press, 'groups of migrants threw stones at parked and moving vehicles in the middle of the night, as well as at homes and even the fire and police vehicles.' A report on the situation in a local newspaper on Tuesday quoted a resident saying:
People are fed up. We are starting to hear talk of [vigilante] militias being formed. The population is tense. We can't let this continue.
The response of the British government to the news that it has passed the 50,000 migrant mark in just 13 months was to blame the criminal gangs. Baroness Smith of Malvern, Labour's education minister, said it was not Labour's fault but rather the gangs who had 'got an absolute foothold in the tragic trafficking of people across the Channel'.
But these are the same gangs Yvette Cooper was talking about in 2018. Shouldn't she have prepared a plan of action to 'smash the gangs' years ago in expectation of coming to power?
As if to underline the ineffectiveness of this Labour government, Frontex also released figures for other popular migrant routes into Europe. Most show a marked decrease in the number of irregular entries. The Eastern Mediterranean passage is down 16 per cent for the first seven months of 2025 compared to the previous year; in the Western Balkans it has dropped by 47 per cent and the Western Africa route is down by 46 per cent. Migrants entering via the Central and Western Mediterranean have increased slightly (9 and 11 per cent respectively) but they are small in comparison to the 26 per cent rise in Channel crossings.
Frontex attributed the Channel increase to good weather and the use of 'taxi boats' that pick people up from various spots on the French coast to avoid detection by police and coast guards. Furthermore, the gangs who run this taxi service are filling their boats with more migrants, sometimes as many as 100 in one small vessel.
Frontex concluded that 'smuggling networks remain active and agile'. In other words, the only thing that changed since 2018 is the numbers. If Sajid Javid called a couple of hundred migrants a 'major incident', one wonders how Yvette Cooper would describe 50,000?
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