Britain’s coast: vulnerable to smugglers?

“The world wept last year,” said the Daily Mirror, “when the tiny, lifeless body of Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi was scooped from a Turkish beach.” Might we soon witness a similar tragedy on our own shores? All the signs are that the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean is now spreading to the Channel. Last weekend, 18 Albanians had to be rescued from a sinking dinghy as they attempted to reach the Kent coast under cover of darkness. That came only days after 17 migrants had been arrested at Chichester Marina. Britain has been guilty of complacency, said The Times. A few months ago, the Home Office assessed the risk of migrants being smuggled into this country on small boats as “not significant”. Yet it’s clear that people traffickers have now begun to target our shoreline, which is littered with “beaches that are relatively quiet and offer a safe landing”.

Britain is particularly vulnerable on this front, said Tom Harper in The Sunday Times. Its Border Force has only three patrol boats to protect 7,700 miles of coastline. And these three vessels are only equipped to leave their home port of Portsmouth for 48 hours at a time, seriously limiting their range. France, by contrast, has “40-plus fully seagoing vessels” to patrol its 2,100 miles of coastline, while Italy has 600-plus seagoing patrol vessels. To be fair, said The Daily Telegraph, the Home Office is now taking steps to improve our maritime border security: it has promised several new patrol vessels and is creating three permanent command centres, in Cornwall, the Thames Estuary and the Humber. But these measures are both tardy and insufficient.

This is a classic media overreaction, said Alan Travis in The Guardian. Just because we’ve intercepted a couple of boatloads of migrants, that doesn’t mean Britain is about to be invaded by an immigrant armada. The Channel is “one of the most monitored stretches of water in the world. It has to be, as it is one of the busiest shipping lanes.” We don’t need to have a flotilla of Border Force cutters monitoring cross-Channel traffic, because we already have radar and other highly sophisticated tracking systems to do that. As for our coastline, the Border Force “works closely with the harbour masters in every port, who know only too well when there are unusual movements on their patch. If they don’t spot them, then there is no shortage of locals to alert them.” Perhaps one day this form of people smuggling may become a problem for Britain, but today’s overexcited headlines have more to do with the imminent EU referendum than they do with reality. The Mediterranean boat crisis has not arrived on Britain’s shores.