Labour’s answer to Britain’s illegal migration crisis has always been to ‘smash the gangs’.
While the Tories talked about their Rwanda plan, which failed to deport a single migrant involuntarily and cost hundreds of millions of pounds, Labour’s solution could end up similarly; all rhetoric and no action.
Under Labour there has been no sign that the small boats invasion has stopped, or even slowed.
On 5 October 973 illegal migrants in small boats entered the UK, the highest number this year. Robert Jenrick in August pointed out that studies in the Netherlands show the average cost of an illegal migrant to the taxpayer is £400,000; just think of how many years of taxes you contributed to pay for one single illegal migrant, let alone 973 (in one day!).
The financial cost of illegal migration is, of course, dwarfed by the criminal threat that comes from allowing thousands of young men we know nearly nothing about into the country.
The brutal murder of the young Thomas Roberts in 2022 by the illegal Afghan migrant Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai is just one example of how catastrophic our open borders policy has been.
To implement Keir Starmer’s soundbite, the prime minister has appointed Martin Hewitt as the UK's first Border Security Commander.
Some have speculated that Labour have created the Border Command as a political shield to protect themselves from criticism; If the gangs haven’t been smashed, that’s down to the Border Command, not the PM, they may well plead.
Others have pointed out that the very concept of ‘smashing the gangs’ as a way of stopping the boats from coming is flawed.
They argue that once a criminal gang is shut down, it is only too easy for another to emerge and take advantage of Britain’s soft-touch approach to border security.
Upon his appointment, Starmer said: “No more gimmicks. This government will tackle the smuggling gangs who trade the lives of men, women and children across borders.”
“Martin Hewitt’s unique expertise will lead a new era of international enforcement to dismantle these networks, protect our shores and bring order to the asylum system.”
Martin Hewitt does not lack experience.
He began his career in the Armed Forces, where he spent seven years before joining Kent police in 1993. In 2005 he was transferred to the Met, where he rose through the ranks to become the Chair of the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) in 2019.
The council exists to coordinate UK law enforcement, and Hewitt held this difficult responsibility during the coronavirus pandemic.
Many conservative commentators have pointed out that Tony Blair was expert at depoliticising (or what others might call creating unaccountable bureaucracies) difficult issues, and appointing his ideological allies into key positions to create a permanent Westminsiter elite. One suspects that Starmer, in this case, has learned from the political master.
Hewitt has been an outspoken critic of previous Conservative governments. For example, he has publicly clashed with Suella Braverman, when she, as Home Secretary, accused the police of being too ‘woke’.
In a 2023 speech to the Police Federation of England and Wales Conference, the then Conservative minister told officers: “I’m not fighting my campaign against political correctness in policing only for the sake of the law-abiding majority who want to see officers patrolling the streets, not policing pronouns on Twitter.”
She said that every crime must be investigated and criticised the police for engaging in distractions from this task, including “enforcing non-existent blasphemy laws unnecessarily, recording a non-crime hate incident or joining in with political demonstrations”.
In November 2022 Hewitt defended the police from accusations of becoming Left-wing and engaging in woke activities, saying: “If we are accused of being woke when taking action that we know is effective in building trust, with people where that increased trust is needed, we must stand tall and champion and defend that action”.
He described accusations of wokeness as “unhelpful” and said that “Calling something woke is an easy one-liner that will get you a headline and it’s great on social media but I don’t think it’s particularly helpful.”
He even said that the police “shouldn’t be cowed” when people accuse them of being woke, and noted that he had raised the issue with Braverman.
The idea that the police were supporting woke political issues did not just emerge from the mind of Suella Braverman. During Hewitt’s time at the NPCC, police officers took the knee at Black Lives Matter protests, supporting a hugely controversial and divisive movement that supports identity grievance politics.
Officers also investigated so-called ‘non-crime hate incidents’, which many criticised as being arbitrary and an attack on free speech, and so-called ‘offensive’ tweets about Transgenderism.
He repeated his defence against accusations of wokeness in March 2023. Hewitt, when asked by The Guardian if he agreed with Braverman’s accusation that the police had become too woke, said: “I don’t share that view… Politicians have gotta do what politicians are doing, you know, they’re doing politics, I’m doing policing.”
In the same interview he claimed that Conservative “austerity” measures had severely weakened social and community services, ignoring the fact that under the Cameron government’s supposed “austerity”, public spending increased across the board and saw the UK’s national debt rise substantially.
While Hewitt’s defence of police activities which have been called woke and his vocal opposition to Conservative government policies reveal his political stance, perhaps more concerning is his approach to policing itself.
In a 2020 interview with The Independent he said: “I am not in a place that’s just ‘lock everyone up’.”
Hewitt said he prefers focusing on prevention of crime rather than arrests and prosecutions; His solutions to crime prevention included investment in mental health, community, and youth services.
Yet evidence has shown time and again that locking up criminals does work; Just look at El Salvador and how they went from being one of the most dangerous countries in the region to one of the safest by simply imprisoning tens of thousands of gang members.
If the Border Czar decides to apply his Left-wing philosophy on crime to the illegal migration crisis, perhaps we can expect a huge investment in mental health and youth services in Calais. What we cannot expect, however, is that any gangs will be ‘smashed’ or that the boats will stop coming.
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