The
Sunday read
Immigration
and asylum
‘Smash
the gangs’: is Labour’s migration policy just a slogan?
Amelia
Gentleman
The UK
government is desperate to show it is preventing small boat crossings, but its
PR-heavy approach may cause more problems with voters than it solves
Sun 8 Jun
2025 06.00 BST
At 5.30am
on Tuesday, six immigration enforcement officers and a BBC TV crew gathered in
a deserted B&Q car park near Sheffield’s railway station, waiting in the
rain for a call from London that would trigger simultaneous arrests of
suspected people smugglers in six towns.
Forty
minutes later, the Home Office staff drove in convoy to a nearby residential
block (followed by the BBC and the Guardian), made their way up the stairs
carrying a red battering ram, ready to smash the suspect’s door down. The
equipment wasn’t needed, because the man, barefoot in his checked pyjamas,
opened the door and let the team inside. He was given a few moments to get
dressed, before being taken silently in handcuffs to the van outside, sweat
running down his face.
Footage
of the wider operation was broadcast that night on the BBC and also ITV News at
10, with the security minister, Dan Jarvis, in Cheltenham, wearing a black
immigration enforcement stab vest, observing another of the six linked arrests.
Keir
Starmer posted photographs of the raids on X, tersely announcing: “When I said
we would smash the people smuggling gangs, I meant it.”
It was a
useful bit of positive messaging, carefully facilitated by the Home Office
press office, in a week when ministers have been confronted with uncomfortable
evidence that their efforts to prevent the arrival of small boats are flailing
just as spectacularly as those of the last government.
Last
Saturday 1,195 people arrived in the UK on 18 small boats, the highest number
of arrivals this year, bringing the provisional total for 2025 to 14,811; 42%
higher than the same point last year (10,448) and 95% up from the same point in
2023 (7,610). The defence secretary, John Healey, said Britain had “lost
control of its borders over the last five years”.
The Home
Office tried to explain the rising numbers by releasing figures showing that
the number of “red days” – when weather conditions are favourable for small
boats crossings – peaked in 2024-25.
Conservative
opposition MPs accused the government of “blaming the weather”. “Public opinion
won’t put up with this,” the Reform UK party leader, Nigel Farage, told GB
News, urging the government again to declare a national emergency on illegal
immigration.
With
Reform’s popularity ratings surging, the government is under enormous political
pressure to show that its much-advertised “smash the gangs” policy is beginning
to work. Last week’s raids were flagged as an anti-gangs success, but they
turned out to be entirely unconnected to people smuggling in small boats. The
six people who were arrested on suspicion of facilitating illegal entry are
believed to have helped at least 200 Botswana nationals to travel to the UK by
plane on tourist visas, and to have assisted them with false documentation on
arrival to claim asylum or to get work in care homes.
The
criminal and financial investigation unit of the Home Office’s immigration
enforcement team said this was one of the department’s top 10 immigration
investigations, ranked by potential financial gain, number of people involved
and risk of harm to victims exploited by the gang.
Reminding
the home secretary that small boat crossings were “one of the biggest
challenges your department faces”, the Labour MP Chris Murray asked Yvette
Cooper at a home affairs select committee hearing: “Can you tell us how many
gangs you’ve smashed so far?”
The home
secretary gave some details about the arrests that morning, prompting Murray to
respond with enthusiasm: “When I asked that question, I did not expect you to
say you had smashed a gang today!”
In its
manifesto, Labour made it clear that the policy of launching a new border
security command with hundreds of new specialist investigators using
counter-terror powers was designed to “smash criminal boat gangs”.
The
arrests may have represented a significant development for Home Office staff
trying to crack down on the exploitation of vulnerable people trafficked into
the UK and criminalised by being forced to work illegally, but packaging this
as a major breakthrough in the smash the gangs drive has prompted some raised
eyebrows.
One
former Home Office official described taking TV cameras to these arrests as a
sleight of hand, a PR exercise designed to detract attention from a small boats
policy that he said had so far been a “damp squib”.
Peter
Walsh, a senior researcher with the migration observatory at Oxford University,
said the government should be given some leeway because the border security,
asylum and immigration bill, which will bring in the much-trailed
counter-terror style powers to help identify and control smuggling gangs, has
not yet been passed. “Overall it’s too early to evaluate their ‘smash the
gangs’ policy, because the main legislative developments are in that bill,” he
said. “But it would be difficult to describe whatever has been done
operationally so far to disrupt smuggling networks as a success, because the
numbers [of small boats] have gone up.”
Starmer’s
catchy “smash the gangs” slogan risks becoming almost as much of a millstone as
his predecessor Rishi Sunak’s commitment to “stop the boats”. Sunak’s pledge
was described as impossible to achieve the moment he announced it, but he
continued to put out videos repeating his promise, and gave immigration control
speeches standing behind a lectern with a “stop the boats” logo.
Labour
may eventually be able to show some progress on dismantling organised people
smuggling operations by citing rising arrest figures. The Home Office press
office said that, from July to November 2024, its immigration enforcement teams
have convicted 53 people smugglers, including 23 individuals for piloting small
boats, leading to more than 52 years in sentences. But Walsh questioned whether
these arrests would have a discernible impact on the number of people crossing
the Channel in small boats.
“It
doesn’t require substantial investment in training and skills to have a
functional smuggler on the ground, getting boats into the water in Calais,
getting people into boats. But it takes a lot of resources to investigate them
and bring them to justice. One of the major challenges is that lower-level
smugglers can quickly be replaced,” Walsh said, pointing, as a comparison, to
the speed with which gangs dealing drugs hire new recruits to replace those
arrested.
“Smuggling
networks are adaptable. They’re increasingly well financed and decentralised.
Senior figures operate in countries like Afghanistan, where we have minimal or
no law enforcement cooperation.”
Campaigners
for an overhaul of the asylum system have been dismayed by Labour’s resolutely
tough rhetoric on those crossing the Channel illegally, which often fails to
acknowledge that many arrivals are coming from war-torn nations such as
Afghanistan, Syria, and Eritrea. This week, a research paper published by
Border Criminologies and the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford
found that hundreds of those imprisoned for arriving in the UK on small boats
since 2022 were refugees and victims of trafficking and torture, in breach of
international law. It said at least 17 children had been arrested and charged
with “facilitation”, for having their hand on the tiller of a dinghy.
Enver
Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, said the government should
“dial down the rhetoric”, and adopt a quieter multi-pronged approach,
cooperating more deeply with France and other European countries, undermining
the business model of the gangs by creating safe and legal routes for people to
apply for asylum in the UK.
“The more
you make announcements on a week-by-week basis, the more you give the
impression to the public that you’re going to fix the problem very quickly, so
you end up falling into the trap of damaging trust because you’re overpromising
and underdelivering,” he said.
It is a
message that Starmer’s comms team has yet to learn. In a second tweet on the
subject of smashing the gangs in the space of 24 hours this week, the prime
minister announced: “My government is ramping up our efforts to smash the gangs
at their source.” Attached was a video montage of boats, barbed wire, police
vans and men being arrested, overlaid with the words (in emphatic capitals)
“OUR PLAN IS WORKING”.
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