Posted on 05/05/2026 6:20:50 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
More than 800 people crossed the English Channel in small boats in the first three days of May, according to government figures.
The Home Office said 55 were brought to Dover on Friday, 325 on Saturday and 422 on Sunday.
It means 7,218 migrants have arrived by small boat so far this year. In the corresponding period of 2025, the number of people who had made the crossing was 11,516.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Britain, under Starmer is a goner.
The UK voted for this. They should get what they voted for.
The last Conservative government was just as hopeless at dealing with the small boats illegal immigration crisis. At one point, Conservative Home Secretary Priti Patel had a discussion with Home Office colleagues where the idea of using wave machines to discourage small boat crossings was put forward!
Could have voted Reform in the last election. They were *right there* - but nooooo, vote Labour, they won’t do what they did pre-Thatcher! Wait, why are they doing what they did pre-Thatcher?
A simpler method would be to just deploy the Royal Navy to turn the boats back or sink them.
Reform is not a serious political party. It has put up some shockingly ignorant and poorly educated candidates. It is basically just a vehicle for Nigel Farage to become Prime Minister. By the way, he rarely bothers to turn up to his MP's surgeries in his deprived Clacton constituency to listen to the problems of his constituents. Clacton contains the village of Jaywick, which was named the worst place for poverty in the UK for several years running. Basically, the people there are miserable and are looking for scapegoats (illegal immigrants and foreigners in general) to lash out at and Farage is an expert at using that sort of simmering anger to gain political office.
A simpler method would be to just deploy the Royal Navy to turn the boats back or sink them.
Putting aside basic morality, the British government has to adhere to international law. The deliberate sinking of boats full of illegal immigrants would violate a plethora of treaties and agreements that were agreed over decades, including:
Article 98 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea
The International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea
The International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue
The European Convention on Human Rights
Article 31 of the 1951 Refugee Convention
Article 4 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions
Britain would be sanctioned by the United Nations and prosecuted by the European Court of Human Rights and by the International Criminal Court if it were to sink those boats.
Didn’t say the people had to be on the boats. We stop smugglers and illegal immigrants all the time on the seas and take them off their boats, then sink the now abandoned boat as a hazard to navigation. The Royal Navy could actually do that just fine; it is long accepted international practice.
And as much as you mock Reform, how, exactly, would it have been worse than what an unchecked Labour has made of the UK?
What would be the point of doing that? The boats are all confiscated when they arrive on the English coast. They cannot be used again. Taking the illegal immigrants off the boats at sea and sinking the inflatable rubber dinghies (which won't actually sink and could get caught up in the propellers of ships etc) wouldn't change anything. The people removed from the boats by the Navy would have to be taken to England where they would claim political asylum (as we don't have permission to take them back to France), so the problem would be unaffected.
The British authorities have been seizing the boats for years. They are cheap and nasty mass-produced rubber dinghies. They are expendable and the international people-smuggling gangs can always get more of them.
If it were up to me, I would arrest the refugees that arrive and put them in secure detention camps (not hotels, as is the current practice). Those that have no reasonable political asylum claim should then be swiftly deported.
When Britain was a member of the EU it had the legal right to deport all of these boat people back to France etc. However, the previous Conservative government of that time utterly failed to make proper use of that right.
The problem is the French government. They were given £1.6 billion since 2018 by the British government for extra policing along the coast and drone surveillance etc to stop these boats, but they keep coming. £476 million was given to them for this purpose since 2023. They are still pissed off with us over Brexit and allowing illegal immigrants to go to the UK is a win for them as it means they don't have to support/process them.
And as much as you mock Reform, how, exactly, would it have been worse than what an unchecked Labour has made of the UK?
Labour are useless because they are simply not ruthless enough. Starmer could force through changes with his huge parliamentary majority, but he wimps out when his backbenchers rebel. For example, they have failed to clamp down on benefits designed to secure the votes of pensioners (many of whom are wealthy) and on people who don't work but just have numerous kids for the extra child tax credits. However, Labour has only been in power for under 2 years, whereas the last Conservative government was in office for over 14 years and so it has to accept responsibility for a lot of the current mess.
Reform is basically just a protest vote. Most of their candidates are newbies with zero experience of public office and zero chance of getting into power on their own merits (unless they are riding a wave of stirred-up populist anger). The only positive of them is that if the two major political parties feel they are going to lose a lot of seats to Reform they will toughen up their policies in the run up to the next General Election and stop the piss-takers (career welfare claimants, bogus political asylum seekers, tax-dodging corporations et al.).
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