Rishi was reckless to promise to stop the boats. But anyone who trusts Labour to do better is simply deluded

RISHI SUNAK’S greatest mistake will probably turn out to be his pledge, made on January 4, 2023, to ‘stop the small boats’.

They even put it up on the Government website. There were four other pledges. The fifth was: ‘Passing new laws to stop small boats.’

Not ‘ reduce’. Not ‘ do our utmost to lower the number’. Just ‘stop’.

It’s hard to recall a more reckless promise made by a leading politician. No one forced Rishi to make such an unqualified undertaking. It was a gratuitous error, which is coming back to haunt him.

Over the weekend, 791 migrants are known to have crossed the Channel in two days, bringing this year’s total so far to 5,435. That means that the number of arrivals has increased by more than 40 per cent compared to the same point in 2023.

Perilous

A fluke? I doubt it. The weather has been good, so more people than usual have come across. But the sea will be calm again, and we may be certain that large numbers of small boats will once more traverse the Channel to our shores.

It’s true that in 2023 the number making the perilous voyage was just over a third less than in 2022, when there was a record high. But the signs so far this year are that 2024 could be worse than 2023, and possibly worse than 2022.

What is clear is, firstly, that the French authorities are not succeeding in stemming the flow of migrants, despite being given £ 480 million over three years by the Government last March. This came after £232 million had been handed to Paris for the same purpose during the previous nine years.

It’s also clear that the Government’s Rwanda Bill, which should finally become law in the next few weeks, is not yet deterring illegal migrants from coming here. As the plan is to dispatch hundreds rather than thousands to Rwanda in the first year, one may reasonably wonder how many asylum seekers will be deterred after the Bill takes effect.

I dare say — though I’m not certain — that an aeroplane with migrants aboard may take off for Rwanda in the late spring, which would be a symbolic victory. But I’ll be very surprised if the number of small boats crossing the Channel is significantly less by October or November, when an election will probably take place.

So Mr Sunak will be much mocked by Labour and Sir Keir Starmer, before and during the election, for failing to fulfil his pledge. He has walked into a trap of his own making. We can hardly feel sorry for him.

But just because Rishi has made a hash of things, it doesn’t follow that Sir Keir will be any better.

Almost all that Labour does is carp at the Government’s failures, which is easy enough to do. But the party has failed to persuade us that it will reduce the number of small boats. Its plans are pretty risible.

Sir Keir has said that he would junk the Rwanda scheme. Fine — if he can come up with a better one. He could, for example, undertake to construct a camp in some British jurisdiction to which illegal migrants would be sent to be assessed. That is far too imaginative and daring an idea for Labour.

Its plan, if that’s not too grandiose a word, is to try to negotiate a returns agreement with Eu countries to send back failed asylum seekers. Given that most of them are, like us, under enormous pressure from excessive immigration, they would be unlikely to sign a deal that reduced the number of migrants coming here.

Sir Keir’s other idea is to step up cooperation with France. But the French government already appears to be trying harder than it did in order to justify the large amounts of money we are giving it. Patrolling 100 miles of coastline isn’t easy.

Moreover, the French can be forgiven if they don’t want to bust a gut to prevent illegal immigrants — whom they are secretly pleased to get rid of — from turning up in Kent.

Sir Keir and Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper are merciless in ridiculing poor Rishi. But the truth is they haven’t a convincing policy of their own to foil the small boats. Anyone who makes a bet that there will be more, not fewer, of them under Labour is unlikely to be risking their money.

There’s a deeper reason why I don’t trust Labour to crack this problem. It is that the party has traditionally been extremely relaxed about immigration, legal and illegal. During Tony Blair’s time in office, net migration soared from 48,000 in 1997 to 273,000 in 2007.

Cohesion

Indeed, there’s evidence that Labour under Blair, and subsequently under Gordon Brown, actively encouraged migration. Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Blair and Home Secretary Jack Straw, has alleged that New Labour deliberately threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country.

Many on the Left still think it racist to oppose uncontrolled immigration, despite the pressure it puts on housing, schools and the health service, as well as it undermining social cohesion. Sir Keir may well hold such views. He will be surrounded by many who do.

We should remember that legal immigration dwarfs the illegal variety that so obsesses Rishi Sunak and the Tories. According to official figures, in the year to June 2023 there were 52,530 ‘irregular migrants’, while in the same period there were 672,000 legal migrants. That is a ratio of about 1 to 13.

Of course, it’s not just Labour that historically favours mass migration. So does the Treasury for economic reasons. Yet last week Conservative MP Neil O’Brien produced a graph that demolishes the widely held assumption that high immigration powers economic growth.

Error

It tracks per capita GDP growth and rising net migration from 1965 to 2023, and demonstrates that there is no correlation between the two. In fact, since 2008 per capita GDP growth has been moribund or sometimes nonexistent, while net migration has been running at unprecedentedly high levels.

Mass immigration is undesirable for all sorts of reasons. I’ve no doubt that in Britain and the rest of Europe it will be the most contentious political issue of the next 20 or 30 years.

Mr Sunak’s failure to deal with either illegal or legal immigration has made him unpopular with many Tory voters, some of whom have defected to Reform uK. A new poll suggests that some 42 per cent of them would return to the fold if Rishi held a referendum on the issue. What would it ask?

It’s hard to see how a referendum would help. The Government already has widespread public support to control immigration. It just hasn’t done it. Rishi may have seen the error of his ways, but he’s running out of time to do anything about it.

All I can say is that voters who would trust Labour to bring down immigration are deluded. I doubt it would get a grip on the legal variety, and small boats would cross the Channel in greater numbers.

Rishi Sunak has failed to control immigration. Sir Keir Starmer could be far worse.