The Home Office has achieved something remarkable: they’ve become genuinely shocked by a problem they’ve spent six years not solving. A record 230 people crossed the Channel in a single boat last week, which the government immediately blamed on gangs using “reckless and dangerous tactics.” Correct. Gangs are reckless. This is news to no one except apparently the people paid to prevent it.
The government’s response is to express outrage at the gangs for cramming people onto unseaworthy vessels. Which is fair criticism of the gangs. Less fair: acting as though the existence of gangs willing to do this is a surprise rather than the inevitable consequence of closing every legal route while offering zero alternatives to desperate people.
What’s the actual strategy here? Nobody knows. The Home Office statement was essentially a press release saying “bad thing happened, bad people did it.” This is true but also useless. A toddler could identify the problem. A functional government might address why people are willing to risk death in the first place, but that requires policy work rather than performative horror at the Home Office’s own failure.
Six years, multiple ministers, countless announcements of “crackdowns” that cracked down on nothing. The boats keep coming because the logic is simple: smugglers offer a service people will pay for because the alternative is slower, more expensive, and illegal anyway. The government’s strategy appears to be expressing surprise that this continues to happen.