Keir Starmer's failure to tackle the people smugglers betrays Britain's vulnerability
SIR – If Sir Keir Starmer cannot defend our shores from people smugglers (' Why Britain faces its worst ever summer for migrant crossings ', report, June 3) then he frankly has no chance of defending the country against a modern, well-trained and equipped opponent.
Until the Prime Minister stops the arrival of thousands of illegal migrants to the south coast, nobody will believe a word he says with regard to the defence of this country.
Ian Grice
East Haddon, Northamptonshire
SIR – The United Kingdom has a massive housing shortage, congested roads and a looming water shortage. How does the Government think that the huge numbers of illegal migrants landing on our shores will do anything other than exacerbate these problems?
Nobody has been building a town the size of Torquay each year to keep up with this population explosion. This comes on top of high legal migration. If more workers are needed, we must help the existing millions of young British adults into work instead of writing them off.
Duncan Hartley
Solihull
SIR – The massive expansion of the number of illegal migrants crossing the English Channel this year is apparently down to the increased number of days with suitable weather for crossings.
The incontestable follow on from this statement from the Home Office is that the only remedy the current Government has for this issue is to pray for bad weather. If there was any other viable policy on offer, surely the Government would have drawn our attention to it.
Andrew Beale
Hoveton, Norfolk
SIR – We pay huge amounts of taxpayer's money to France, only for its police force to stand idly by watching overloaded boats setting off for Britain (' France agrees to intercept migrant boats for first time ', report June 5).
Even if this situation does change, surely this money would be more effectively spent if it were paid directly to the people smugglers, on condition that they seek an alternative form of employment.
Richard Hall
Egginton, Derbyshire
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Telegraph
8 hours ago
- Telegraph
Keir Starmer's failure to tackle the people smugglers betrays Britain's vulnerability
SIR – If Sir Keir Starmer cannot defend our shores from people smugglers (' Why Britain faces its worst ever summer for migrant crossings ', report, June 3) then he frankly has no chance of defending the country against a modern, well-trained and equipped opponent. Until the Prime Minister stops the arrival of thousands of illegal migrants to the south coast, nobody will believe a word he says with regard to the defence of this country. Ian Grice East Haddon, Northamptonshire SIR – The United Kingdom has a massive housing shortage, congested roads and a looming water shortage. How does the Government think that the huge numbers of illegal migrants landing on our shores will do anything other than exacerbate these problems? Nobody has been building a town the size of Torquay each year to keep up with this population explosion. This comes on top of high legal migration. If more workers are needed, we must help the existing millions of young British adults into work instead of writing them off. Duncan Hartley Solihull SIR – The massive expansion of the number of illegal migrants crossing the English Channel this year is apparently down to the increased number of days with suitable weather for crossings. The incontestable follow on from this statement from the Home Office is that the only remedy the current Government has for this issue is to pray for bad weather. If there was any other viable policy on offer, surely the Government would have drawn our attention to it. Andrew Beale Hoveton, Norfolk SIR – We pay huge amounts of taxpayer's money to France, only for its police force to stand idly by watching overloaded boats setting off for Britain (' France agrees to intercept migrant boats for first time ', report June 5). Even if this situation does change, surely this money would be more effectively spent if it were paid directly to the people smugglers, on condition that they seek an alternative form of employment. Richard Hall Egginton, Derbyshire
Daily Mail
10 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Starmer's trade deals FIASCO: 'Win-wins' are just sugar-coated concessions
Keir Starmer has sought to portray his hastily stitched together trade deals with the United States, the European Union and India as unalloyed triumphs. The way he tells it, you'd think he is so persuasive at the negotiating table that he could sell ice to Eskimos and sand to Arabs. But the truth is that a Prime Minister in need of an economic success story to sell to an increasingly disillusioned electorate has sugar-coated the outcomes of these talks and misleadingly presented them as 'win-wins' for UK plc. In fact, he has been bamboozled and outmanoeuvred at every turn by representatives of foreign powers who really do know how to play hardball. Take the French president Emmanuel Macron's outrageous piece of brinkmanship over fishing rights. Aware of how desperate the embattled Starmer was to announce a new trade deal with Brussels, he ambushed him at the 11th hour with a demand that EU fishermen be given further rights to our waters for 12 years. No wonder one member of an influential French fisheries committee later gloated: 'We couldn't have hoped for better.' And what did we get in return? A vague promise to allow British travellers to use e-gates at European airports at some unspecified point in the future. Starmer's willingness to sign agreements that have concessions to the other party baked in – but only airy promises about reciprocal benefits – is a feature of all the deals he has signed to date. The American deal, for example, has more holes than a sieve. Under the terms of the 'US-UK Economic Prosperity Deal', we were told that Britain would be freed from a 25 per cent tariff on steel and aluminium, for example. (A tariff, incidentally, that was later doubled to 50 per cent but is currently on hold until July 9.) The dash for a carbon-free economy means that there is only one UK blast furnace producing vital virgin steel currently operating at full capacity. As a result, the White House is concerned about the prospect of Britain sending cheaper imported steel to the US that has been pressed or rolled in this country. So the US negotiators are insisting that only steel that is 'melted and poured' in the UK (in other words, smelted in a furnace) is covered by the trade deal. All very well, but one of Britain's biggest steel exporters is Tata Steel. It shut down its blast furnaces at Port Talbot in South Wales last year, so must currently import raw steel from the Netherlands and India – both subject to American tariffs. This is a knotty problem – and the clock is ticking. Unless an agreement can be reached by July 9 when the new tariff rates kick in, Britain's steel exports will be hit by that punitive 50 per cent rate. So much for the US deal. The EU one is even worse. While Starmer surrendered to Macron's ultimatum over fishing, Brussels remained characteristically obdurate when it came to its €150 billion (£125 billion) defence fund. Despite the growing threat from Russia, the US's coolness towards Nato and Britain's leadership in high-tech warfare – not to mention our control of the Eurofighter Typhoon platform – Starmer extracted only the woolliest of commitments from the EU. The bloc merely said the new deal 'will pave the way' for Britain's defence industry to participate in the EU's fund. There were similarly weasel words when it came to the use of e-gates by British travellers to the Continent. Under the terms of the deal, access would be given as 'soon as possible', yet we could be queuing for years to come. Even the recently agreed trade deal with India has its critics. It included an extension from one to three years to a scheme that offered Indian workers employed here on a temporary basis an exemption from National Insurance Contributions – a totally toxic clause given Chancellor Rachel Reeves' now notorious October Budget, which raised Employer National Insurance Contributions. What is particularly shameful is the dishonest way in which the Government has presented the deals to the British people as if they are a big win for everyone. Tell that to the working men and women and fishing crews whose livelihoods are threatened by the weakness and incompetence of the man at No 10.
Daily Mail
10 hours ago
- Daily Mail
HAMISH MCRAE: Flying Footsie defies the gloom
If the Government's finances are in such a mess and the economy is stagnant, why are share prices close to an all-time high? Could it simply be the UK is a pretty good place to invest – provided you are a foreigner and don't have to pay our taxes? This week sees Rachel Reeves' spending review, setting out what the Government proposes to do with our taxes for the next three or four years. It's the first shot a Labour government has had at this exercise since 2009, in the aftermath of the banking crash. Then Chancellor Alistair Darling savaged spending plans to such a scale that, in theory at least, there would be cuts of 490,000 public sector jobs. It was a total about-turn of the exercise by Gordon Brown when money taps were flowing. The so-called 'austerity' of the Coalition Government the following year was actually started by Labour. Reminding people of this is not to beat up Reeves' predecessors, or to get into the debate about spending headroom, or the commitment to the Office for Budget Responsibility's fiscal rules. It is just to point out that, for all the fine words of successive Chancellors, they are prisoners of the harsh mathematics of public finances. If the taxes come in strongly, that is fine. If not, they are in trouble. Right now, notwithstanding her increase in tax rates, revenues are weak. Why? Well, we don't yet know, but it looks like people with money are hunkering down – or bunking out. The top 1 per cent of earners pay 29 per cent of all income tax, and the top 10 per cent pay 60 per cent. It's early days, but there are bits of evidence of a shift in behaviour. The Capgemini World Wealth Report last week showed that the UK lost 14,000 millionaires last year. That's not as big a decline as in France or Germany, but a stunning contrast to the increase of 562,000 millionaires in the US. There is data from Henley & Partners that 26,000 non-doms left the UK last year, and there are suggestions that the changes brought in by Reeves will cut tax revenue rather than increase it. Job losses are certainly coming as a direct result of the increase in employers' National Insurance Contributions (NICs), but thanks to the unreliability of the Office for National Statistics' numbers it's too early to know how hard employment is being hit. What we do know is that revenues from income tax, NICs and capital gains tax in April, the first month of the financial year, were disappointing – disappointing, that is, from the perspective of the Treasury, if not from those of us handing over the money. This isn't a mass exodus of high-earners or of the already wealthy. It feels more like the 1970s when some people did leave the country, but most just cut their costs and waited for the change of government that eventually happened in 1979. The difference is that back in the 1970s, financial markets were all over the place, the pound was savaged before recovering, and inflation was heading upwards. Now UK shares are doing well, and the pound has made a decent recovery. The FTSE 100 index, at 8,838 is only 50 points off its all-time high in March, and the pound is back to $1.35. It is completely plausible that the Footsie could go through 9,000 in the next few days, and I expect sterling to reach $1.45 by year-end. All this is happening despite the chaos in world trade and expectation that Reeves will have to raise taxes again come the autumn. Why? Three explanations. One is that the UK equity market is the least ugly, or at least one of the less ugly, contenders in the global beauty parade. Where else do you put your money? You are buying into large, hitherto relatively unfashionable enterprises that earn decent profits and pay good dividends. At a time of huge uncertainty, you should not try to be clever, but just diversify your assets. Two, the fact that Britons are to be clobbered with yet higher taxes and the economy will stay stagnant is unimportant to foreign investors. Big UK firms earn on average three-quarters of their profits overseas. And finally, even if the global trade war does hot up, the UK is not in Donald Trump's firing line. What's not to like?
