Why 'Smash the Gangs' is even worse than 'Stop the Boats'
What if we imagine a world where small boat migrants themselves have agency?
Today the Prime Minister unveiled his long awaited immigration white paper. He says new measures will substantially reduce numbers of migrants coming to Britain. But how true is this really?
The Director of the Oxford Migration Observatory Madeleine Sumption told me today the measures are in the order of 10-15% of the total number of visas granted last year. In 2024, non visit and non transit visas granted totalled 955,576. Let’s be generous and cut that by 15%. That’s still 812,240 visas.
I do wonder if the felt impact of 812,240 visas granted rather than 955,576 will really match the Prime Minister’s “islands of strangers” rhetoric, already being condemned by his own MPs as “laying the groundwork for Nigel Farage”.
And beyond the legal numbers, what did the Prime Minister have to say about illegal arrivals? Zilch. While legal migration is of course entirely distinct from illegal small boat crossings, the issues are enormously conflated in the minds of the public. One politician who understands this more than most is Nigel Farage. The man leading in the polls and odds on to be the next British Prime Minister.
As the current Prime Minister was speaking from Downing Street, the Reform Party leader was busy tweeting to his millions of followers that hundreds of migrants were already making their way across the channel, preparing to illegally enter Britain. Today’s surge in crossings alone is due to total over 600.
Which brings us to “smash the gangs”. The three word slogan dreamt up in Westminster hoping to connect to voters who have lost hope.
It’s hard to think of a more visceral and communicable crisis for the government than tens of thousands of men (and yes it is almost exclusively men) clambering aboard rigid inflatable boats, making the 21 mile journey to Kent.
What feels like a compounding gut punch to millions of voters is that upon arrival being given free housing, free food, free clothing and footwear, free phones, free toiletries, free non-prescription medicines, free laundry, and free travel.
Being given all of these things, courtesy of the taxpayer, seemingly in thanks for doing the one thing the government says that they mustn’t.
To most voters, it is simply baffling to see government after government say it is trying its utmost to stop small boat crossings, only to immediately reward those who make it to Britain with hotel accommodation and a stipend for other goodies.
Indeed, it is hard to think of a stronger metaphor for state failure than a country famed for having ruled the waves of the world, now being unable to rule the ripples of the English channel.
Of course what is never acknowledged properly by politicians is the fact that under the 1951 Convention on Refugees, Britain is duty bound to uphold the core convention principle of non-refoulement, or in plain terms never returning an individual to a country where they face serious threats to their life or freedom.
In order to meet this principle, every asylum seeker who manages to set foot on British soil effectively has a guaranteed asylum hearing, and cannot be deported to a country where they may be unsafe.
This means that, to many, the scramble is on - simply to get to British soil and enter the system.
Yet, in the face of tens of thousands of asylum seekers dismissing the pleas of hapless politicians to stay away, the Prime Minister believes he has a solution. Having scrapped the gimmicks of previous premiers, Keir Starmer has one of his own. Gang smashing.
The theory goes like this: thousands of helpless migrants are trafficked by a small number of nefarious people smuggling gangs. These evil gangs stuff their victims onto unsafe boats, bundling them into the UK in what can only be described as something bordering on modern slavery. Once you take out the gangs running the operation, so thinks the government, the migrant channel crossings will stop.
It is tempting, particularly for politicians on the left, to adopt this humanitarian point of view. Through this lens, no one can call you callous. You are helping those on board the boats, because they don’t really want to be on those boats. You are a modern day William Wilberforce.
If your worldview is based upon not individual incentives but instead oppression olympics, you must find a prism through which you can respond to the deeply unpopular problem of illegal immigration while also positioning yourself as a champion of the dispossessed. By smashing the powerful (people smuggling gangs) you help the powerless (asylum seekers).
But this entire framework rests upon one fatal conceit - that asylum seekers are all victims. That they lack agency themselves. That they are simply commodities to be smuggled by distinct nefarious characters.
But here’s the rub.
What if perhaps, just perhaps, people seeking asylum in the UK want to seek asylum in the UK? What if they are not travelling under duress, but because they have paid many thousands of pounds to board those boats? What if the gangs are not the cause of the issue, but in themselves represent a response to market demand?
What if the constantly press-released arrests of people-smuggling gangs represent about as much success in the battle to prevent channel crossings as arresting drug dealers suppresses the demand for controlled substances?
Drug dealers don’t create that initial demand for drugs. Initial demand for drugs creates drug dealers.
And so, despite people smuggling gang arrests publicised more than ever, 2025 is set to be yet another record breaking channel crossing year. Last month bore witness to 10,000 crossings one full month ahead of the previous year’s record. At some point the government will have to ask a piercing question. What happens when you succeed in smashing ‘the gangs’, and the people continue to come?
Because they do want to come. These people aren’t trafficked. Many, out of nothing more than rational self interest, pay their way to better circumstances. Take one asylum seeker recently interviewed on Newsnight. Amazingly, he said the quiet part out loud.
"I had Asylum in Greece, but as I mentioned nobody wants to live in a tent".
He paid €3,000 to instead come to Britain. Not for asylum or safety, but because of the living standards. That’s nothing to scorn. That may well be rational from this individual’s point of view. But that’s economic migration not freedom from torture.
Let’s, for a moment, assume that migrants have agency and respond to incentives. That they have hopes, dreams, and ingenuity. Even as much as the nefarious gangs.
Once a gang is gone, could it be that a migrant looking to make a better life for himself in a richer country takes the thousands of pounds he would pay for a place on a small boat, and perhaps buy a boat for himself?
Last month even saw a crossing in a kayak.
It’s worth remembering that before the boats, there were lorries. From 2010-2015, £316 million was spent to deter illegal immigration in Calais and the surrounding region, namely through significant infrastructure around ports. The numbers coming across the channel by jumping on heavy goods vehicles consequently plummeted. And the boats started coming instead.
This presents a profound conundrum for the British government. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea places a duty on Britain to rescue any people in distress in its waters. And while France forbids Britain from taking Calais migrants back to the beach they set off from, that means taking them back to Blighty.
Obviously returning migrants to France would be the simple answer. But without French cooperation, this becomes legally and practically impossible.
Enter Rwanda. A creative policy that perhaps isn’t as insane as it sounds, if one has to work within the constraints of the UN conventions the UK is party to. By deporting asylum seekers, both legitimate and illegitimate, to a safe third country - this avoids the refoulement principle.
Theoretically, no longer can you be halted by the courts from putting an asylum seeker in harms way, as the country they are sent to is safe.
While Rwanda was derided as a gimmick, it is hard to see how to ‘control’ your asylum system through anything other than use of a safe third country if your starting point is following the 1951 Convention. Where else do you send migrants who have made it to your shores? Particularly if they come from a country like Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, or Sudan.
Of course flying people half way around the world seems impractical. Can there be any other way of fixing the problem?
Enter Tony Blair. In 2001.
As Prime Minister, Blair saw the beginnings of a new age of global migration. As communism fell, and global trade opened up - countries around the world got richer. Far from a lack of economic development facilitating movement of people, it was a greater level of economic development that allowed for people - previously stuck - to move.
Blair saw the UN Convention on Refugees as wildly out of date. Designed for an era of post war Europe, not the global flow of millions. As Prime Minister he proposed Convention reform. He said that "The UK is taking the lead in arguing for reform, not of the Convention's values, but of how it operates”.
More than twenty years later, it’s time to revisit Tony’s idea. If the only sensible option within the 1951 Convention of Refugees is something as mocked and derided as the Rwanda policy, perhaps the time has come for the government to throw its entire diplomatic weight behind Convention reform.
It’s easy to see how Starmer could find allies for this 21st Century mission in Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, Australia, and the United States.
Will he take up from where Tony Blair left off? Somehow I think he would prefer to play the endless game of whack a mole that he calls ‘smash the gangs’.