Starmer's sunk over Migrant Boats!

PM Keir Starmer sailed into a fantasy the other day by blaming Nigel Farage and Brexit for the surging tide of migrant small boats crossing the English Channel. His fake claim was that these vessels are essentially “Farage boats,” and that the UK’s exit from the EU has rendered migrants irremovable due to a specific lost agreement. He tried to nail it on Brexit. He’s lying and here’s why.

You see his narrative falls apart even under the mildest scrutiny. At the heart of Starmer’s argument lies the now-defunct Dublin Regulation, a pre-Brexit EU pact designed to return asylum seekers to the first European country they entered.

In theory, it promised streamlined deportations. In reality, it was a massive flop. According to Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, the UK averaged just 560 returns annually from 2008 to 2020 under the deal. That’s a drop in the ocean compared to the Channel crossings, which now hit hundreds—even over 1,000—daily.

In the year before the 2016 Brexit vote, only 468 people were sent back.

The Observatory’s report starkly concludes:

“The impact of Brexit is likely to have been minimal—the decline in returns predates it.”

Even worse than that, the Dublin agreement actually forced the UK to accept more arrivals than it expelled. Let that sink in! In 2020, its final full year in the scheme, Britain took in 882 migrants from other EU states while removing a mere 105!

Now Starmer knows all this history, of course, Yet he still invoked it to dodge accountability for his own government’s response. After all, it was under Starmer’s watch that the crisis has intensified. Small boat arrivals are up a third this year compared to 2024. His “smash the gangs” strategy—bolstered by more bureaucracy—yielded zilch. His “one in, one out” pact with France is a joke: just seven deportations so far, offset by three new arrivals. Scaling it to 50 weekly would still be futile against the deluge. Starmer also scrapped the Rwanda deterrent plan before a single flight, after years of Tory legal wrangling.

So why the finger-pointing at Farage, the longtime critic of open-border laxity? It’s deflection, pure and simple. With no viable plan, Starmer scapegoats the man who’s highlighted the madness for years—and, by extension, the 17.4 million Brexit voters. This isn’t leadership. It’s a catastrophic failure to enforce borders, not a vote eight years past.