ALAN MENDOZA: If Starmer really wants to stop illegal migrants, he should encourage the rest of the EU to follow Germany and bring back borders

When the ultimately fruitless preparations for Priti Patel’s Rwanda deportation scheme were at their height in the summer of 2022, mutinous Home Office civil servants posted ‘refugees welcome’ stickers around their offices.

A particularly rebellious poster that appeared on one official noticeboard read: ‘We have the spine to say, ‘No minister’. No to hostile environments, no to shutting down democracy, no to racist deportations.’

This week, the Labour Government discovered that it too will find it hard to win over a department that – despite political impartiality being a legal requirement for civil servants – appears to be largely populated by people with a fanatical opposition to immigration control.

Officials are ‘underwhelmed’ by the government’s plans to curb the wave of small boats reaching our shores, it is claimed, and ‘nobody’ understands what the new Border Security Commmand (BSC), launched with great fanfare just days after Labour swept to power in July, will do to address the problem.

Well, this time, I am entirely on the side of officials at the Home Office.

To the surprise of no one, the Government’s policy of throwing money – £150million no less – at a new Home Office body with an impressive but meaningless name is having absolutely no impact on the number of migrants crossing the Channel.

Only on Saturday, another 572 migrants crammed themselves into overcrowded dinghies to cross one of the busiest stretches of water in the world. Their arrival took the the number of small-boat migrants to reach Britain so far this year to 32,691, a rise of 22 per cent on the equivalent number last year.

So much for Keir Starmer’s promise to ‘smash the gangs’, the well-organised groups of people smugglers who make millions each year from trafficking this human cargo.

The truth is that the Prime Minister’s words are just empty bluster. We’re seeing no evidence that his plan is working, or even that he intends it to work.

According to a press release on the gov.uk website, the BSC will ‘unlock sophisticated new technology and extra capabilities for the National Crime Agency to disrupt the criminal people-smuggling gangs’

Indeed, some argue that the BSC – led by former police chief Martin Hewitt – is a job-retention scheme to offer employment to civil servants left with nothing to do following the scrapping of the Rwanda scheme.

Its budget does not even consist of new money, merely cash redirected from the Conservative government’s Illegal Migration Act coffers, despite Labour giving us the false impression that it is the product of additional funding.

According to a press release on the gov.uk website, the BSC will ‘unlock sophisticated new technology and extra capabilities for the National Crime Agency to disrupt the criminal people-smuggling gangs’.

The technology employed includes covert cameras and monitoring equipment and we are promised that Commander Hewitt’s team will ‘improve intelligence collection across UK police forces’, ‘speed up investigations and increase the likelihood of successful prosecutions’, ‘intensify efforts in transit countries to prevent small boat equipment reaching the French coast’ and ‘swiftly bring those responsible to justice’.

Most of this is wishful thinking at best. Some of it is downright nonsense. How on earth are we meant to believe that French authorities will oblige Britain by preventing people from taking small boats to the Channel beaches, when hundreds of thousands of people there are able to sail, row or motor about on the water perfectly legally?

Equally, the idea that gangs will give up and skulk away if we increase surveillance is completely implausible. These criminals have been operating brazenly in plain sight for years. They know we can see them, and they don’t care.

But the greatest failing of Labour’s proposals is that the BSC has the wrong gangs in its sights. The unit’s focus is primarily on the Western Balkans route, by which migrants from the Middle East arrive in the former Yugoslavia countries and are transported west, towards Britain.

That route is only responsible for a fraction of the problem. A much bigger issue is the influx of migrants from north Africa, who cross

the Mediterranean into southern Europe. And in order to tackle that, Europe has to fundamentally rethink its borders.

Starmer should be saying, loudly and clearly, that the migration crisis will continue until the EU ends its impractical and naively idealistic border rules. Under the Schengen Agreement of 1985 which enables free movement of citizens, people can traverse the continent with virtually no border checks.

That means migrants who reach mainland Europe are able to cross the EU to the French coast in a single bound without having to produce any papers.

The result is chaos. And Britain isn’t the only country to bear the brunt of it.

This phenomenon is a pan-European disaster and some countries are finally waking up to it – most significantly, Germany.

What Labour should do – though given its knee-jerk pro-Europeanism and hatred of borders this is a long shot – is encourage the rest of the EU to join the Germans in reintroducing border controls. That is the surest way to halt the flow of migrants.

It’s no use waving them along the autoroutes and waiting till they arrive on England’s south coast before trying to act. They must be identified and stopped while in transit.

The money spent on surveillance cameras and belated prosecutions at home would be far better spent helping our neighbours police their own internal borders.

But that doesn’t mean we must march in lock-step with Europe. One essential pre-requisite to the introduction of an effective immigration system would be a revision of the terms of our commitment to the European Court of Human Rights [ECHR].

As things stand, the ECHR makes it virtually impossible to deport failed asylum seekers who challenge their removal from the UK.

Its powers were vividly in evidence during the endless legal battles over the introduction of the Rwanda scheme, as cynical lawyers used every tactic in the book to block the implementation of the plan.

In a similar way, it is nigh-on impossible to deport illegal immigrants in significant numbers, as long as the ECHR holds sway.

Fix that, and we will be able to send illegal Channel migrants straight back to France, where they can live in safety.

At the same time, we need a more nuanced understanding of what is driving global migration. It isn’t enough to blame the criminal gangs – they are a symptom of the problem, not its cause.

Across Africa and Asia, countless people have got the idea that Britain is a soft touch. We feed that impression with the feckless distribution of financial aid to countries such as China and India that clearly don’t need our money.

It’s condescending, arrogant and counter-productive of Britain to waste money on ill-conceived ‘overseas development projects’ in significant global economies, particularly when our own national borrowing is so high.

The money would be better spent on addressing economic development in countries that are the source of migration, to cut the supply of those willing to head to our borders.

If Labour is serious about stopping the small boats, it needs to adopt an intelligent, multi-pronged approach: strengthening Europe’s defences, changing the ECHR rules that hamper deportations and, above all, ending the border free-for-all.

Alan Mendoza is a co-founder and executive director of The Henry Jackson Society.