Mr Andrew Snowden

It does not matter how many times the Prime Minister repeats and repeats his vacuous election slogan of “smash the gangs”, there is no plan to do it, it is not happening and nobody out there believes him. The Government had an opportunity when they came to office. The Rwanda scheme was on the brink of becoming operational, which would have given them one of the most robust deterrents in Europe. As we saw in Australia, when a scheme similar to Rwanda was set up in the Pacific, it only had to deport the first few thousand and it had the impact of largely stopping the boats arriving—but in a callous, irresponsible and purely political move, Labour cancelled the Rwanda scheme. It is a political calculation that the Government have got entirely wrong, as without a deterrent everything else they announce or say is just words. The Government have had nearly a year to show us they had more up their sleeve on immigration than buzzwords and crocodile-tear outrage about the scheme—so, how is that going? Since the election, almost 36,000 illegal immigrants crossed the channel, a 30% increase on the same period 12 months prior. To date, 2025 has been the worst ever year for small boat crossings, with around 12,000 arrivals. That surge in numbers has led to Labour already breaking its manifesto promise to end the use of asylum hotels. Figures show that on 31 December 2024, there were 8,000 more people in asylum hotels than when the Conservatives left office. The Government have been clutching at straws for good news. They started off by holding a press conference to celebrate the arrest of one member of just one gang—out of the thousands of criminals involved in the illegal immigration trade—to show they were smashing the gangs. If that was not enough of a laughable spectacle in its own right, the investigation had mainly been undertaken before they came to office and such arrests are a matter of course anyway. More recently, they have switched to triumphantly claiming 24,000 deportations. Time and again, even at Prime Minister’s questions today, the Prime Minister has refused to outline how many of those are just routine and voluntary removals, rather than enforced deportations of people who have illegally crossed the channel.