Britain's next small boats crisis is already being created and we are doing nothing

Unless Britain and the world helps restore safety to the world’s horror zones the boats will keep on coming

There are two ways of tackling the small boats crisis that successive governments have singularly failed to deal with.

We can unload criminally trafficked migrants at Dover and put them up in hotels while we make their appointed lawyers even richer (and watch the migrants disappear into the system). Or, we can address the other end of the equation and look at helping fix the awfulness many of them are running from. Yes, many of the boat people are strapping men of military age and we are very right to be suspicious – many are here for what they can get out of us and are precisely nobody’s idea of the huddled masses. And yet in among them, lost usually and indeed often bullied by the aforementioned men, are genuine cases for asylum.

And this is the tragedy which exemplifies the evil of the trafficking gangs.

Every small boat crossing the Channel probably carries a family that ran out of options. A home bombed or burned. A journey that started thousands of miles from here and ends, if they make it, on that beach in Kent. It is odd that we talk about these crossings constantly… but we almost never talk about what is creating them.

In Sudan for example, right now, that journey is beginning for millions of people. And nobody in Government is paying attention. They never really have.

I have written before on how we in the West and especially Britain pick and chose our wars. So Gaza is rarely far from the front pages and chronicled in minute detail while there is almost zero coverage of the war in Sudan which broke out in April 2023 and has driven nearly 12 million Sudanese from their homes. And they have been driven out by the Sudanese Armed Forces, the SAF: an Islamist military with deep roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, the same officer class that hosted bin Laden in the 1990s and carried out the genocide in Darfur. They have been striking hospitals, blockading food supplies, and using chemical weapons on their own population. Children are starving. But Britain and the wider world looks the other way, as if the situation doesn’t impact us. It does.

Over 30 million people need help just to eat. Two-thirds of the country. Bigger than Ukraine, bigger than Syria at its peak. When Syria collapsed, Europe got two million refugees in a single year, and it nearly broke the EU apart. Sudan has displaced 12 million already and the war is still going.

Families flee first to Egypt, to Chad, whichever border is closest. But those countries are not where they stay. They wait, save whatever they can, and plan the next move. From Egypt the path goes west to Libya. From Libya, boats. The crossings are already climbing.

The SAF leadership is not some shadowy militia. These are generals whose names are known, whose arms suppliers are on file, whose bank accounts sit in foreign jurisdictions. The United States has already acted. In June this year Washington imposed a second round of sanctions under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Act, targeting the procurement networks supplying weapons and explosives to the SAF and calling on all partners to cut off external support. Britain has not joined in. We have sanctioned nobody.

So we send aid money to feed the people their army displaced, and we say nothing to the Islamist generals giving the orders. British taxpayers keep alive the people that a foreign military is deliberately starving. We just keep writing cheques and hoping the problem stays over there. It will not.

I am not saying every refugee is a threat. But that is what happens when a system is overwhelmed and nobody can keep track of who is coming in or where they have been. You do not fix that at the border. You fix it by dealing with the problem before it becomes a problem.