The United Kingdom is now in a rolling crisis that its leaders can neither manage nor control. We should pay attention.
Hardly a day passes without some news item out of Britain that underscores the depth of the crisis in that country.
Over the weekend, it was news that 1,500 migrants had crossed the English Channel illegally from France — in less than 72 hours. During a stretch of good weather, hundreds of people disembarked at migrant processing facilities in Dover on a daily basis, bringing the total number of Channel migrants this year to 38,450, well above the 36,816 who crossed during all of 2024.
The surge of illegal migrants came just as Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government had been suggesting that the low number of crossings in recent weeks was thanks to government policy. Turns out it was just because of bad weather. “We see it repeated time and time again. When the winds blow and the waves pick up, we get few if any crossings. When conditions calm down, they surge across in large numbers,” said one maritime source.
The Starmer government had previously claimed that its “one in one out” agreement with France had been working. The scheme, which took effect in August, means illegal migrants who arrive on small boats can be detained and sent back to France in exchange for an equivalent number of migrants who apply for asylum legally. It’s the sort of plan you come up with when you want to be seen as doing something without actually doing anything.
But even on those terrible terms, the policy quickly became an embarrassment. In October, “one in one out” made headlines when an Iranian man who had been deported to France under the agreement was apprehended entering the UK again just days later. After he was deported a second time, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood claimed, outrageously, that it was evidence “the system is working.”
This kind of official response belies either astounding incompetence or barely-disguised malice. You would think that confronted with thousands of migrants illegally entering Britain from France every week, the government would rightly conclude that France is allowing migrants to cross the English Channel illegally en masse. You would think there would be repercussions for that. But instead, the British people get farcical statements from their political leaders about how the “one in one out” policy is working, even as the boats stream across the Channel.
Meanwhile, the consequences of unchecked migration and non-assimilation are playing out on the streets of increasingly dangerous British cities. Most of the migrants arriving in Britain are from places like Eritrea, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Somalian — societies that have very different views of civic life and of civilization itself. Most of them are Muslim, and upon their arrival they are absorbed into one of Britain’s many growing unassimilated Muslim communities — in Birmingham, Bedford, and parts of London like Tower Hamlets. These are places that only bear a faint resemblance to what they were 20 years ago thanks to mass immigration.