How the media and political class push a dangerous fantasy about the small-boat “invasion”
I have a message for Kay Burley: Please tell Rhiannon Whyte’s family that 230 illegal migrants are as innocuous as supermarket shoppers
At 2:30am on Monday morning, a ‘small’ boat carrying a record 230 illegal migrants was intercepted by authorities and brought to the Kent coast.
Based on a Dutch study which estimated the lifetime cost of an asylum migrant to the Treasury at £400,000, the 230 men could ultimately cost the British taxpayer a collective £92 million. That’s one expensive dinghy.
But for Kay Burley, the former Sky News presenter, the boat brimming with young African men posed less of a threat than a group of young shoppers at her local Waitrose, writing on X: “I’ve seen longer queues in the ‘five items or fewer’ isle [sic]. Stop it, just stop it!”
She was replying to Reform’s Zia Yusuf, who called the boat an “invasion”.
So who is correct? The small-boats crisis has been ongoing since 2018, during which Tory and Labour governments have facilitated the arrival of more than 200,000 illegal migrants on Britain’s shores. In that time, we have seen innumerable cases of these young men from Africa and Asia (there are almost no women and children) committing some of the most horrific crimes against British people.
Eleven weeks after Sudanese 27-year-old Deng Chol Majek took off from a boat in Dover, he took a screwdriver and plunged it into the face of Rhiannon Whyte twenty-three times. Eleven of those stabs penetrated her skull. It took her three days to die.
Afghan Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai arrived in Britain illegally in 2018 (on the back of a lorry). It took him nearly four years before he took a blade and shoved it into the chest of 21-year-old aspiring Royal Marine Thomas Roberts, killing him nearly instantly after the two had argued over the use of an electric scooter. In his years before killing Roberts, he terrorised school children with knives (after the Home Office bought his story that he was 14, when he was actually 19, and so was placed in a school with Year 9 pupils) and his poor foster mother. He was wanted for two prior murders on the continent, but the Home Office didn’t bother to do proper background checks on him, and so young Thomas had to die.
Egyptian 26-year-old Ibrahim Alshafe and Iranian 26-year-old Abdulla Ahmadi met each other on a small boat from France on 19 June last year. A few months later they raped a woman on Brighton beach, while another illegal migrant they met at their taxpayer-funded hotel, Karin Al-Danasurt, 21, another Egyptian, recorded the attack on his phone.
I could cite innumerable cases of attacks illegal migrants have committed. From terrorism to rape to murder. The cost in blood and treasure to the British people has been immense.
And yet despite all this, to those like Kay Burley these men are as innocuous as M&S shoppers.
There is no invasion. These are simply desperate people from war-torn countries looking for safety (we must all forget that France is a safe country, as is every country they have been to in Europe and most of them in Africa and the Middle East). They are not young men, but women and children.
Responding to Monday’s record-breaking boat, the prime minister’s spokesperson said: “We’ve seen today some appalling images... of young babies being put into these unseaworthy craft... shocking images, and they show the reality behind the ruthless smuggling gangs that are prepared to risk human lives for profit.”
The statement reminded me of when Labour MP Darren Jones said on Question Time: “the majority of the people in these boats are children, babies and women”.
Official figures put the number of men at around 90% of small-boat arrivals. Labour’s understanding of illegal migration is contemptuously ignorant, wilful or not.
