By DAVID BARRETT, HOME AFFAIRS EDITOR Published: 12:45 BST, 1 October 2025 | Updated: 14:22 BST, 1 October 2025
Keir Starmer strayed into fantasy when he claimed Channel migrants come to Britain aboard ‘Farage boats’ and cannot be removed from this country due to Brexit.The Prime Minister’s claim is preposterous and simply not grounded in fact, as even impartial observers agree.When he referred to pre-Brexit Britain having ‘a returns agreement with every country in the EU’ he was referencing the Dublin Agreement, which was supposed to facilitate asylum seekers being sent back to other European Union countries through which they had travelled.But, put simply, the Dublin Agreement did not work.The number of returns from Britain to the Continent which were achieved under the deal were tiny. A few hundred a year.Oxford University’s Migration Observatory – one of the most respected organisations in the immigration sphere – said in a report published in August that the number returned under Dublin was ‘an average of 560 a year between 2008 and 2020’.The academics’ study added: ‘The impact of Brexit is likely to have been minimal - the decline in returns predates it.’In the 12 months before the Brexit referendum, the UK removed 468 people under the Dublin convention.Contrast that with the number of migrants arriving across the Channel from northern France – which are routinely hundreds and sometimes more than 1,000 a day – and you can see Starmer’s argument already begin to disintegrate.Dublin clearly offered no solution to a crisis of this magnitude. The Prime Minister’s 'Farage boats' claim is preposterous and simply not grounded in fact, as even impartial observers agree By spuriously seeking to pin the blame on Nigel Farage the PM is – by association – also pillorying the 17.4million Britons who voted for BrexitFurthermore, because the UK was required to accept migrants from other EU countries as part of the reciprocal deal we were often taking more in than we were getting rid of.In 2020, the final year Britain was a member of the agreement before transitioning out of the EU, this country took in 882 foreign nationals but removed only 105.That was despite the Home Office making a further 8,400 requests to EU member states that year which were simply ignored, presumably out of animosity towards Britain over its decision to leave the bloc.Starmer KC and his big legal brain should know all this.But he doesn’t, or pretends he doesn’t. Why might that be?The PM has already been forced to move one home secretary, Yvette Cooper, after misguidedly accepting her argument that ‘smashing the gangs’ and bolstering Home Office bureaucracy would solve the problem.It has not done so, and the Channel crisis is worsening rather than improving. Small boat arrivals so far this year are up one third on last year.The PM’s ‘one in, one out’ deal with France is so unambitious it’s laughable, with seven migrants sent back so far and three welcomed here in their place, according to the last count.Even if that scheme is scaled up to the rumoured 50 deportations a week, it will barely scratch the surface.Starmer scrapped the Tories’ Rwanda asylum deal before the first removals flight even had the opportunity to take off, following two years of legal delays.So the PM knows his Government does not have a plan.He is instead reduced to censuring other people for the crisis, like the Reform leader who for years has been pointing out the idiocy of the Channel crisis and urging successive governments to act.And by spuriously seeking to pin the blame on Nigel Farage the PM is – by association – also pillorying the 17.4million Britons who voted for Brexit.
