A record 230 migrants crossed the English Channel from France in a single dinghy on Monday, more people than the typical capacity of a Boeing 737 jet, prompting the Conservative Party to accuse the Labour government of presiding over a "complete and utter farce."
The vessel measured 49 feet from bow to stern, 7 feet longer than the dinghies that set the previous record last month and more than 10 feet longer than a standard double-decker bus. People traffickers are thought to charge around £2,000 a head for the crossing, meaning the boat could have earned smugglers as much as £450,000.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said Labour's "weak attempts at fixing the Channel crisis have turned the UK into a complete laughing stock," and that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood "is presiding over a complete and utter farce." He said Mahmood was "handing over £660million of our money to the French, who are pathetically standing around on the beaches while hundreds of migrants embark on massive dinghies."
Philp also criticised French gendarmes for failing to stop the dinghy launching. "This is now beyond a joke. The French authorities could easily have stopped a vessel this size from embarking in shallow waters," he said, adding that he had recently watched gendarmes "shamefully standing by and doing nothing while illegal immigrants boarded in knee-deep water."
The mega-dinghy arrived less than two weeks after Prime Minister Andy Burnham insisted the government's plan to tackle the Channel crisis was working. Philp called Burnham "out-of-touch" for claiming there was no problem, and said Burnham should adopt the Conservative plan to leave the European Convention on Human Rights and deport all illegal immigrants within a week of arrival.
Political reaction to the crossing
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said small-boat crossings should be declared a "national security emergency," adding that illegal arrivals were "out of control." Reform's home affairs spokesman, Zia Yusuf, called the mega-dinghy "nothing short of a national humiliation," saying: "Britain's borders are now a standing joke with people smugglers who are laughing all the way to the bank, knowing they can operate with impunity."
Numbers climbing this year
Official figures up to Sunday show 15,242 small-boat migrants have arrived in Britain this year, not including Monday's mega-dinghy. Of those, 2,773 have arrived since Burnham became prime minister on July 20.
The previous record for a single crossing was 165 people aboard one vessel on July 23. A third dinghy carrying 173 people caught fire early in its journey last week, triggering a major emergency before its occupants were returned to France. Since smugglers began using mega-dinghies last month, two are known to have reached the mid-point of the Channel, the world's busiest shipping lane, before migrants were picked up by UK Border Force and brought into Dover.
The debacle came days after a Home Office source insisted on Friday that Labour's plan to tackle the Channel crisis was "beginning to bear fruit." French rescuers said Monday's dinghy was "buckling" in the water and could have led to a tragedy.
Chaos on the French coast
A lifeboat crew at Berck-sur-Mer, part of the SNSM, France's equivalent of the RNLI, said the dinghy already had about 50 passengers aboard when it was spotted heading towards a beach to collect more. Around 30 people ended up in the water during a rush to climb aboard at 5pm on Sunday, and part of the group was cut off by the tide and had to be rescued. The overloaded boat was described as "buckling under the swell" as it headed for Britain, carrying 232 migrants until two asked for assistance and were taken back to Calais.
Also on Sunday, French police looked on as dozens of migrants, including babies, climbed aboard a boat off Camiers beach, south of Boulogne.
Government's Channel strategy
Last week UK officials confirmed traffickers were adapting their methods to circumvent Labour's "smash the gangs" strategy. Labour scrapped the previous Conservative government's Rwanda asylum deal and has instead tried to tackle the crisis through improved policing and law enforcement work. Officials admitted this had led smuggling gangs to "experiment" with mega-dinghies, potentially increasing the risk of a mass tragedy, and said organised crime rings were also coordinating dinghy launches from a wider stretch of the French and Belgian coast to evade detection.
Mahmood signed a new security deal with France in April under which British taxpayers will hand over £662million over three years. She called it a "landmark agreement" that would "really arm us to go after the people-smugglers."
Calls for tougher action
Philp visited a French beach last month and said he witnessed gendarmes standing by as small boats disembarked, even refusing to arrest an apparent people-trafficker. David Goodhart, an immigration expert at the Policy Exchange think-tank, called the latest mega-dinghy "a violation of territory and political common sense," saying it "underlines the ineffectiveness of French controls, and our own Government's impotence." He argued no one who enters Britain illegally should be allowed to stay, calling it "a bewildering failure of international cooperation, and British diplomacy" that France will not accept back anyone who crosses illegally. Goodhart said Burnham should use "whatever charm or leverage he has" with French President Emmanuel Macron to insist on "Channel common sense."
The Home Office said it was "making progress, with the number of small-boat crossings down this year and the lowest number recorded for July since 2020." It added: "But we must go further, which is why we have signed a payment-by-results deal with the French to put 40 per cent more boots on the ground on French beaches."
