The following is an essay by Matt which appeared in The Sun this weekend.

NOT a day goes by without some new alarming statistic or fact about Britain’s rising immigration fiasco. Well, try this one for size: More people have now entered Britain illegally on the small boats than are in the British Army.

While the Army has 108,000 personnel, since 2018 more than 155,000 illegal migrants – most of them young men from Islamic nations like Afghanistan, Syria, and Iran — have entered Britain on some 4,300 boats.

It’s a deeply troubling fact, isn’t it?

On Monday alone this week five more boats arrived with 261 more illegal migrants. How many more will arrive today? Tomorrow? Next week? Nobody knows. Because nobody has control.

That was their promise. But we already know they are never going to keep it and perhaps never intended to keep it all along.

Why? Because as each day follows the last, the small boats crisis in the Channel is getting worse, not better. Just look at the numbers.

According to the very latest data from the Home Office, slipped out quietly last month, the number of people entering Britain illegally on the small boats is now up 25 per cent on the previous year. 25 per cent!

Astonishingly, since Labour came to power, promising they would make our borders secure, nearly 28,000 illegal migrants have entered Britain on more than 500 boats.

Only last week, in just seven days, some 1,600 illegal migrants broke our laws by arriving on the small boats, making a mockery of our claim to be a self-governing, independent nation which is in control of our borders.

Labour politicians downplay all this, of course. They will try and have you believe they are returning more illegal migrants than ever. But as the data from the Home Office makes clear, this is deeply misleading.

In reality, Labour and the British state are approving the vast majority of claims for asylum that are made by people who arrived illegally on the boats, many of whom, remember, have already passed through safe countries before arriving in Britain.

In fact, of all the illegal immigrants who arrived on boats between 2018 and 2024 and were given an initial decision two-thirds were allowed to stay in Britain. Two-thirds!

And what percentage of the people who arrived in Britain on the small boats since 2018 have been returned to their countries of origin, do you think?

It’s just 3 per cent — not even 5,000 of the more than 155,000 who have entered.

With these numbers, you might as well put a big, flashing, neon sign on the side of the white cliffs of Dover that reads: “If you break our laws and enter Britain illegally don’t worry – we will let you stay”.

In fact, we won’t only let them stay. We’ll give them cash cards, healthcare, phones, and access to hotels and accommodation, which is precisely why even the French are laughing at us, saying we are a ‘soft touch’.

They have a point.

These strong incentives to come combined with the glaring absence of any serious Rwanda-style deterrent is why Labour’s plan to “smash the gangs” will never work.

I’ve yet to meet anybody in the world of border security who thinks Labour will stop the boats. The academic Thomas Sowell once said that immigration laws are the only laws that ever discussed in terms of how to help people break them. And that’s exactly what’s happening in Britain today —people are being helped to break our laws.

Tinkering around the edges with new task forces and surveillance won’t make a difference when the fundamentals –the prospect of being allowed to stay in Britain forever, the low chance of being removed and an activist legal system that will help you break Britain’s laws—are pushing more and more people to make the journey.

And while Labour MPs would have you believe that the people who are coming are genuine refugees who are an unalloyed good, this too is nonsense.

Worryingly, as we discovered last week, they include people like Abu Wadee —a Palestinian migrant who previously called for all Jews to be killed, attended events led by Hamas leaders, said he would die “for the sake of Allah”, and posed on his social media with guns. Are these the people Labour want in Britain? Are these the people hardworking, tax-paying, law-abiding British taxpayers should be subsidising?

Because that’s who ends up paying the price of this spiralling crisis. It’s not the elites who will end up having to deal with these costs; it will be British taxpayers.

And make no mistake –the costs are spirallInc.

While we already know that the border crisis is costing taxpayers at least £5.4 BILLION every year, only last week the Home Office refused to commit to a date for ending the use of hotels to house illegal migrants. Why does this matter? Because those hotels are costing you, taxpayers, £5.5 million every single day.

It’s merely another depressing statistic, another example of how the British state and everybody in Westminster –Tory and Labour—have completely lost control.

The British people, put simply, deserve better than this.

They deserve to live in a country where the borders are secure, where we know who is coming in, and where we are not subjecting our own people to a crisis that is costing them billions of pounds every year.

They deserve to live in a country where those who enter it illegally, and foreign nationals who break our laws when they are here, are swiftly detained and deported.

To do this, we need to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), reform if not repeal Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act, which entrenched the ECHR into domestic UK law, and start replacing all these incentives with active deterrents.

Only this cocktail of factors will give the British people what they both want and deserve —full control over their own borders, full control over their own laws, and full control over their own country.

And I for one will not stop highlighting these shocking statistics and facts until the British people are finally given what they deserve.