More than 41,000 migrants crossed the Channel in small boats in 2025, a number surpassed only by the 45,000 who made the voyage in 2022. In total, 41,472 people reached England from France, a 13 per cent increase on 2024. The weather was a factor: according to the Met Office, last year provided Britain with the most hours of sunshine – 1,622 – since records began in 1910. But of greater significance is the ineptitude of the British government in stopping the small boats.

A spokesperson for the Home Office described the 2025 figures as ‘shameful’, adding that ‘the British people deserve better’. They would say that, wouldn’t they? It is the hollow rhetoric that the British people have come to expect from Westminster this century.

In 2001, for example, the Commons Home Affairs select committee in conjunction with the Home Office published a report about the deterioration in border controls. Contained in it were 22 recommendations. These included a proposal that ‘the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees should be updated to reflect changes over the past fifty years’; a suggestion to ‘improve the speed and quality of the asylum decision-making process’ and........

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