The English Channel is twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest point. For centuries, that strip of grey water was Britain’s greatest defence — a natural moat that stopped invaders, tyrants and anyone foolish enough to test this island’s resolve.
Today, it’s a conveyor belt. In the last full week of November 2025 alone, more than 1,450 people crossed in small boats. Since Keir Starmer took office, the total has smashed through 50,000 — and that’s only the ones who were actually caught.
Labour swept to power promising to “smash the gangs”. Instead, they’ve effectively handed the gangs a government franchise.
Traffickers now advertise “VIP packages” on TikTok: £6,000 buys you a spot on a dinghy, a French beach pick-up, and once you land here, a nice warm hotel, £49.18 a week in spending money, and a free lawyer to guide you through the system. Never in history have criminals enjoyed such a cosy business model.
And the consequences are being paid in British blood. Two Afghan men who arrived illegally during Starmer’s premiership have just been convicted of repeatedly raping a 15-year-old girl.
They arrived with no papers, were processed with barely a glance, housed at public expense, and then left to roam free.
This isn’t some freakish one-off. It’s the predictable result of a system that treats illegal entry as a minor administrative hiccup rather than a national-security threat.
When you allow men of completely unknown identity to walk straight into the country, you don’t just get “pressure on services”.
Donald Trump humiliates Keir Starmer with devastatingly effective move to stop Britain's small boats - Lee Cohen
|Getty Images
You get criminals, predators — and sometimes Class A drugs wrapped in condoms and swallowed before the boat leaves France.
The National Crime Agency now thinks drug mules using “internal concealment” are routine. Yet not a single prosecution for it has been recorded this year.
Border Force, the Home Office and even the RNLI have been reduced to unwilling couriers in a grotesque importation scheme.
Meanwhile, the French navy escorts the dinghies halfway across, waves goodbye, and sends the bill. This is not cooperation. This is surrender dressed up as diplomacy.
Three thousand miles away, a completely different picture has emerged. In January 2025, Donald Trump walked back into the Oval Office and, within weeks, did what Europe’s leaders had spent a decade insisting was “simply impossible”.
He reinstated in Mexico policy, revived rapid expulsions, expanded safe-third-country deals, tripled ICE removal flights, and shut down catch-and-release.
Illegal crossings on America’s southern border didn’t just fall — they collapsed by more than ninety per cent in the first hundred days.
No new wall. No long negotiations. No deference to NGOs. Just political will. And the world took notice.
The irony is that Britain once possessed that same will in industrial quantities.
The country used to set the global standard for maritime enforcement. In 1807, Royal Navy captains boarded foreign slave ships on the high seas without asking Paris or Madrid for permission.
In the Cod Wars of the 1970s, Harold Wilson sent frigates to stare down Icelandic gunboats over fishing rights.
Trafalgar, the Armada, the West Africa Squadron — Britain has never lacked the means to police her waters. Only the resolve.
Today, the Royal Navy remains one of the most capable maritime forces on the planet.
It has the ships, the helicopters, the special forces, and ample authority under international maritime law to intercept and deter unseaworthy craft.
What it doesn’t have is a prime minister willing to admit what illegal entry actually is: not an unfortunate humanitarian challenge, but a deliberate act that undermines national security, public safety, and democratic control.
Ministers hide behind the ECHR, the courts, and a never-ending parade of process.
Even the much-touted “one in, one out” agreement with France has returned barely a few dozen people — a rounding error against the thousands arriving every month.
Starmer’s big solution so far is to make better PowerPoints explaining why nothing can be done.
But Trump’s playbook is sitting right there, proven and devastatingly effective. End the pull factors: no hotels, no cash, no work permits.
Make it clear that illegal entry leads nowhere except a removal flight. Strike firm returns agreements. And above all: push every vessel back to the shore it left.
The moment the message goes global that Britain no longer rewards illegal entry, the boats will stop. That was Australia’s lesson in 2013. It was America’s lesson in 2025. It could be Britain’s lesson tomorrow morning.
The tragedy is that the Channel isn’t unmanageable. It’s perfectly manageable — Labour simply refuses to manage it.
So long as the government continues running the border in the interests of everyone except the British public, more teenage girls will be attacked by men who should never have been admitted, more heroin will enter migrants’ stomachs, and more hotels will be commandeered at taxpayers’ expense.
Britain once ruled the waves. She can protect them again. But it will take a leader willing to do the one thing the current Government seems pathologically afraid of: follow the example of the only man in the twenty-first century who has actually fixed a broken border.
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