There are now more illegal migrants in UK than soldiers in our army – here’s what we need to do to secure our borders

NOT a day goes by without some new alarming statistic about our rising immigration fiasco.

Well now try this one for size: More people have now entered Britain illegally on small boats than are in the British Army.

While the Army has 103,000 personnel, since 2018 more than 155,000 illegal migrants — most of them young men from Islamic nations including Afghanistan, Syria and Iran — have entered the country on 4,300 boats.

On Monday alone this week, five more boats arrived with 261 further migrants.

How many more will arrive today?

Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Home ­Secretary Yvette Cooper and the Labour Government promised at the General ­Election in July that they would finally get their arms around this spiralling ­crisis by “smashing the gangs”.

That was their promise.

But we already know they are never going to keep it and perhaps never intended to keep it all along.

Posed with guns

Why? Because as each day follows the last, the small boats crisis in the Channel is getting worse, not better. Just look at the numbers.

According to the latest data from the Home Office, which was slipped out quietly last month, the number of ­people entering Britain illegally on small boats is now up 25 per cent on the ­previous year.

Astonishingly, since Labour came to power, promising they would make our borders secure, nearly 28,000 illegal migrants have entered Britain on more than 500 boats.

Only last week, in just seven days, some 1,600 illegal migrants broke our laws by arriving on the boats, making a mockery of our claim to be a self- governing, ­independent nation which is in control of our borders.

Labour politicians downplay all this, of course.

They will try and have you believe they are returning more illegal migrants than ever.

But as the data from the Home Office makes clear, this is deeply misleading.

In reality, Labour and the British state are approving the vast majority of claims for asylum that are made by people who have arrived illegally on small boats, many of whom, remember, have already passed through safe countries before arriving here. 

In fact, of all the illegal immigrants who arrived on small boats between 2018 and 2024 and were given an initial decision, some two-thirds were allowed to stay in Britain. Two-thirds!

And what percentage of all the people who arrived in Britain on the small boats since 2018 have been returned, do you think? It’s just three per cent — not even 5,000.

With these numbers, you might as well put a big, flashing, neon sign on the white cliffs of Dover that reads: “If you break our laws and enter Britain illegally, then don’t worry — we will let you stay.”

In fact, we won’t only let them stay. 

We will give them cash cards, healthcare, phones, driving lessons and access to hotels and accommodation, which is precisely why even the French are laughing at us, saying we are a “soft touch”.

They have a point.

I’ve yet to meet anybody in the world of border security who thinks Labour will stop the boats

These strong incentives to come — ­combined with the glaring absence of any serious Rwanda-style deterrent — is why Labour’s plan to “smash the gangs” will simply never work.

I’ve yet to meet anybody in the world of border security who thinks Labour will stop the boats.

Tinkering around the edges with new task forces and surveillance really won’t make a difference when the fundamentals — the prospect of being allowed to stay in Britain forever and the low chance of being removed — are pushing people to make the journey. 

And while Labour MPs would have you believe that the ­people who are coming are genuine ­refugees who are an unalloyed good, this too is nonsense.

Worryingly, as we discovered last week, they include people like Abu Wadee, a Palestinian migrant who has previously called for all Jews to be killed, attended events led by Hamas leaders, has said he would die “for the sake of Allah” and posed on his social media with guns.

Are these the sort of people Labour want in Britain?

Are these the people hard-working, law-abiding British taxpayers should be subsidising?

Because that’s who ends up paying the price of this spiralling crisis.

It’s not the elites who will end up ­having to deal with these costs — it will be British taxpayers.

We deserve better

And make no mistake — the costs are spiralling.

While we already know that the border crisis is costing taxpayers at least £5.4BILLION every year, only last week the Home Office refused to commit to a date for ending the use of hotels to house illegal migrants.

Why does this matter? 

Because those hotels are costing you, the taxpayer, some £5.5million every day.

The British people, put simply, deserve better than this

It’s merely another depressing statistic, another example of how the British state and everybody in Westminster — Tory and Labour — have completely lost control.

The British people, put simply, deserve better than this.

They deserve to live in a country where the borders are secure, where we know who is coming in, and where we are not subjecting our own people to a crisis that is costing them billions of pounds every year.

To do this, we need to leave the European Convention On Human Rights, reform Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act, which entrenched the ECHR into domestic law, and start replacing those ­incentives with active deterrents.

Only this cocktail of factors will give the British people what they both want and deserve — full control over their own ­borders, full control over their own laws and full control over their own country.