As you know, I will never stop working to represent the Forgotten Majority in the national debate and hold our inept ruling class to account. With that in mind, here’s my latest piece in today’s Daily Mail calling out the utter failure of the Labour government to “smash the gangs”.

Keir Starmer came to power promising to “smash” the people smuggling gangs. But, so far, the only thing he’s smashed is the British people’s sense of fair play.

Starmer posed as the champion of tough border controls after years of Tory inaction. Labour, he promised, would ‘stop the chaos and go after the criminal gangs who trade in driving this crisis’.

How utterly hollow that sounds now, six months after his landslide. Labour’s pledges are in tatters, its credibility has collapsed.

Far from resolving the crisis generated by illegal crossings over the English Channel, the new Government has actually made the problem worse, as highlighted by the latest truly shocking statistics from the Home Office.

Between December 25 and 28 alone, no fewer than 1,485 migrants reached Britain, making this the busiest Christmas period since official records of the Channel racket began in 2018.

Altogether, in 2024, a total of 36,816 people made the perilous journey to our shores, a rise of 20 per cent on the previous year. Astonishingly, this brings the total since 2018 to more than 150,000, enough to almost fill a town the size of Reading with illegal migrants who are breaking the rules and treating the British people with contempt.

Labour’s plan, put simply, is not working.

As everybody who is anybody in the world of border security knows, the surge of crossings is a direct consequence of the Government’s approach.

Starmer, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and ministers like to peddle their slogan “smashing the gangs”, but it will never happen as long as illegal migrants know there is little chance they will be deported.

Just look at Labour’s record.

They’ve already granted asylum to two-thirds of people who applied for it in ‘soft-touch Britain’. You might as well put a big neon sign on the White Cliffs of Dover that reads: ‘If you come we will let you stay!’

Without the legal capacity or political will to remove people who have no right to be here, the demand for crossings will remain – and so will the traffickers who ruthlessly exploit it.

The occasional seizure of an inflatable dinghy in Germany and arrest of a smuggler in France are little more than publicity stunts designed to give the illusion of a crackdown.

Only an active deterrent will break this illicit trade in human cargo.

For all their other weaknesses, the Conservatives recognised that truth. That is why they put together the Rwanda scheme, whereby the central African republic was to be used for accommodating deportees and processing asylum claims.

Despite the derision it attracted from metropolitan sophisticates, the plan could have worked by spreading the message that Britain was no longer a soft-touch for illegal migrants, particularly if the Tories had also been willing to pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights which, from its original conception in the aftermath of the Second World War as an instrument against genuine political oppression, has been transformed into a charter for criminals, protecting rapists, drug dealers, terrorists and even murderers from deportation.

The Labour Government of Tony Blair, which imposed the 1998 Human Rights Act on our legal systems, also began the revolution that has drastically altered the very fabric of our society through record- breaking levels of immigration.

Yet Starmer and his Cabinet have learnt nothing from all this upheaval.

On arriving in office in July, one of their first acts was to dump the Rwandan initiative. They never gave it a chance, nor did they put any effective substitute in its place. They also watered down plans to ensure that anybody who entered Britain illegally would never have the right to stay in the country.

Instead they indulged in bureaucratic tinkering, one of Starmer’s favourite political activities – as this paper revealed last month, Labour have set up a new quango for every week they have been in office.

So a grandly titled Border Security Command was established, complete with a director on up to £200,000 a year and an investment over the next two years of £150 million.

Predictably, the BSC’s only impact so far has been to drain away public money while the Border Force continues to provide a quasi-ferry service across the Channel and the Home Office acts as a hotelier for illegal migrants.

A savage humanitarian price is being paid for the spectacular inability of Starmer and Cooper to resolve this deepening crisis.

The French authorities estimate that 77 people lost their lives in the Channel in 2024, another depressing record. But apart from the shocking death toll, an increasingly heavy burden is also placed on the British people by this disastrous political failure, which threatens the integrity of our immigration system, puts an intolerable strain on our civic infrastructure and undermines the rule of law.

Taxpayers now have to fork out £5.4 billion a year to prop up our broken asylum structure, including hotel accommodation and cash support. That huge bill does not even include a host of other costs such as social security for migrants who do not work, as well as healthcare, education and subsidised transport.

The theory that an unceasing influx of new arrivals from overseas would boost our economy has been tested to destruction. Indeed, in the era of open borders, we seem trapped in a downward spiral of wage stagnation and sluggish growth.

The economic mess is compounded by a profound sense of injustice, an affront to the traditional sense of British fair play, not only because of the blatant queue jumping by immigrants who treat legal entry procedures with contempt, but because many of them are put up in luxury hotels at the public’s expense.

Moreover, tax-paying British citizens also have to bankroll the vast immigration industry – made up of left-wing lawyers, activists and campaigners – whose very existence is predicated on challenging or subverting the law.

It is voters’ resentment at this injustice which has fuelled the rise of the Reform UK party at the expense of Labour and the Tories.

According to one recent poll by YouGov, nearly 70 per cent of British people think that immigration is being handled badly, while another survey showed that among voters who backed Brexit, border policy is now overwhelmingly their chief concern.

In my own work, I have conducted extensive research into public attitudes and found that hostility towards open borders is especially strong in the Red Wall former Labour heartland seats in the north of England that went Tory in 2019.

The Conservatives shamefully squandered their gains by failing to abide by their promise to reduce the level of net immigration, instead allowing it to reach an incredible 903,000 in June 2023 under Rishi Sunak.

Now, Labour is in real danger of going down the same road and the sense of betrayal at the political class is almost palpable, as reflected in the ugly riots during the summer following the multiple fatal stabbings in Southport.

It suits the elite to pretend that the public’s anger is just a product of “far-right” agitation, but that does not stand up to scrutiny.

The British public can see with their own eyes that the vast experiment in uncontrolled immigration is failing as social cohesion breaks down and solidarity is lost.

They know, for all the ‘virtuous’ claims of the Left, that there is nothing compassionate about allowing this anarchy to continue.

If Labour wants to survive in power, the party needs a much more realistic policy than the ones which have signally failed to work so far.

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This article (The only thing Keir Starmer is “smashing” is the British people’s sense of fair play) was created and published by Matt Goodwin and is republished here under “Fair Use”

Featured image: dailymail.com, trip.com (modified)