Labour’s small-boat policy risks foundering

Good morning. One of the Sunak government’s big political problems was its ambitious commitment to “stop the boats”, something it never got close to doing and which became a running sore.

And one of our new-ish Labour government’s big political problems is its slightly less ambitious commitment to “reduce” the number of small boat crossings by “smashing the gangs”, something it has not yet succeeded in doing. Some thoughts on what links Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer’s approaches and what, if anything, might get the incumbent government off the hook in today’s note.

Small numbers in the big picture

Small boat crossings make up a tiny proportion of the overall number of people coming to the UK. Even when it comes to asylum claims in Britain, which hit a record 108,138 last year, higher than the previous recorded peak of 103,081 in 2002, they contribute about a third of that total.

They do, however, have an outsized political impact. I don’t think you can plausibly tell the story of how the Conservative party lost its century-long advantage over Labour on the issue of immigration without giving most, if not all, of the attention to small boats.

Others disagree. Many in both the Tory and Labour parties believe the increase in overall numbers under Boris Johnson was a larger factor. I don’t buy this, for the simple reason that while British voters consistently tell pollsters they want immigration reduced, they don’t actually oppose any of the visa routes Johnson opened, and they reject any individual measures to get immigration down. Sentiment towards immigration across the country in the 2020s bears little relation to the geographic distribution of immigrants, which is an important difference from opposition to immigration in the 1900s, 1960s and 2000s. So I think it stems largely from policy failure on small boats, not objection to people coming to fill vacancies in the UK labour market. Though, of course, we can’t know either way.

But the reason why the question of “what really bothers British voters?” matters is that it shapes what options Labour has to get out of the same political trap as the Conservatives in 2024. The last government’s failure to “stop the boats” was in part driven by its success in “stopping the lorries”, which, before it tightened up enforcement, was the main route for people coming to the UK illicitly. (Some Labour Home Office veterans during 1997 to 2010 and some involved in the last Conservative government have wryly observed that the Tories would have been better off had they been less effective at stopping the lorries.)

Coming to the UK under or in a lorry comes with risk, and some people died making the journey. But it was much less risky than coming via the Channel, the world’s busiest shipping lane. It was also much less visible, both to anyone who watches the news and to people who live in coastal communities. (To return to my “it’s the boats, stupid” theory, it is in these communities where concern about immigration is highest. But they do not, for the most part, have a lot of regulated, economically motivated immigration. They are, however, much more exposed to small boat crossings.)

Labour’s theory is that by tackling and crushing the gangs that run most of the boats, you can significantly reduce the number of people arriving. Thus far, this really has not worked.

I concede that it is far too early in the life of the Labour government to judge the long-run success of its plans. Thus far, though, the only policy to have really made a significant dent in reducing arrivals are deals with countries of origin, such as Albania.

It’s an old truth that if there is demand for something, someone is going to make money providing it, whether legally or illegally. A lot of people want to come to the UK, thankfully, given our ageing population and that there are, broadly speaking, two types of country in the world (places people want to get to and places people want to get away from).

My general view — given I think it is the boats, not the numbers, Labour has to fix — is that the government would be better off providing more documented routes to the UK, and that approach, coupled with methods to crush the gangs, would reduce the number of small boat arrivals. (This is the implicit logic of its agreements with France.)

There are important policy reasons to want to do this too: someone who comes to the UK via an irregular route, whatever their intentions, is unlikely to ever integrate or enter the formal economy. So, even though small boat crossings are a comparatively tiny proportion of the total migration numbers to Britain, it really does make a difference if people who come do so via an undocumented route versus a proper process.

Labour’s big bet is that by reducing small boat crossings, the total number of people coming here will shrink by an outsized amount. But it may be that the Conservative party’s success in restricting routes (so that the only unregulated one is the dangerous Channel crossing) means Britain has already “reduced” the boats. That would make Labour’s commitment as big an albatross for it as Sunak’s doomed pledge to stop them entirely.

Now try this

Thanks to the many, many readers who recommended that I buy Cook’s Camden. It’s a delightful coffee table book about the development of “Low-Rise, High-Density” (LRHD) housing, something the borough of Camden and its chief architect, Sydney Cook, pioneered. It is full of beautiful pictures and fascinating history. (I promise I will shut up about having moved flats very soon, but I can’t say the book will stop me boring on about the need to build more at high density.)

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