Let’s not get hysterical. Let’s just look at the logistics and do the sums. The numbers don’t lie. They tell us with absolutely unrefusable clarity where we are and what is happening. When the picture becomes clearer – and it will – then we can become hysterical, because I’m not sure what else to suggest.
Yesterday 900 illegal migrants arrived in the UK, ushered in by our ‘Border Force’ coastguard, doubling the figure for the previous 5 days. So, that is almost 1800 in a week. More will arrive, weather permitting, later this week, and still more on the weekend. Twenty-five thousand have already arrived this year. That is enough to fill a town twice the size of Epping in Essex, where we saw anti-migration unrest earlier this month.
Since 2018, over 160,000 have arrived – that is enough to populate a large city like Chelmsford, the capital of Essex. In fact, if you built a new city to accommodate just the small boat migrants, it would be one of the three biggest cities in Essex. It is no wonder the people of Epping (population a mere 12,000) is suffering form a sort of anaphylactic demographic shock!
Essex is just one site of such tensions, of course. The newspapers are full of stories, so I don’t have to rehash them here. I’m not really focusing on incidents; I just want to look at data.
Back to numbers. The Labour government (re)announced today that it intended to build 4000 homes in the next year. But we’re expecting the arrival of ten times that number of small boat migrants. How many houses will 40,000 migrants need? At an average of 3 people per typical British household, the government would have to treble the number of houses it builds per annum just to house the Boat People. Where are the houses for British people?
Now, since the houses are still pie-in-the-sky, let’s return to the issue of the 1800 people who arrived in the last week. Where will they go? The average ‘Travelodge’ style hotel has 70-100 rooms. Even if you crammed 4 illegal boat migrants into a room, you’d still need 5 Travelodges to accommodate just the people who arrived this week. Yes, you read that right. FIVE! The government has to find accommodation the equivalent of five typical Travelodges or Holiday Inns this week. Will they rent them out, will they buy them outright? Since the taxpayer is footing the bill, I think there should be more transparency.
What am I missing? I’m trying not to panic, but the numbers are the numbers.
The only solution I can see to a government that refuses to stop them or deport them is to acquire land and build more Milton Keynes-style cities which can be given to them, because obviously occupying all the hotel space in British towns and cities is going to be a financial and political disaster.
But where will they find the land? What will the political ramifications of building (essentially foreign) cities on UK soil be? It seems like a crazy line of questioning, but if we don’t do this, what exactly is the plan?
We have to stop pretending that this can go on without a clear plan. Instead of trying to chill public discussion, the Government needs to set out a clear way forward and present it to the British people. It is our future, and we deserve to know the facts and to be part of the decision-making. It is unconscionable that we seem to be at the mercy of an arrogant and unaccountable government with no real popular mandate.
By 2030 – on the current trajectory – a quarter of a million people will have washed up, illegally, on our shores in small boats. A quarter of a million! Three quarters of these will be unaccompanied adult males. They will want what all adult males want. How are we going to provide this?
Please don’t say “We’ll smash the gangs!” Mr Starmer, because no one believes that. Tell us the real plan. Or are you also too overwhelmed by the numbers to think straight?
