Small boat crossings fell again this month — down almost 65% in October.
After a 20% drop in August and a slight bounce in September, the last three months are down 30% on 2023 and 60% on 2022, the peak year for crossings.
This is, on the surface, great news. Crossing the Channel in small boats piloted by criminal smugglers is an outrage. Every life lost at sea is one too many.
But if the boats stopped tomorrow, the lives of those who rage about them would not change one bit. They wouldn’t be richer, safer, or happier.
And that’s the real horror story.
The news that small boat crossings are falling won’t bring relief — it will bring denial, resentment, and fresh targets for anger.
Now that the crossings are down, the fury has moved on to those who are already here — people who came legally, live peacefully, and contribute to British life.
The Conservatives and Reform are already locked in a race to promise deportations of legal migrants.
The truth is this: the “small boats crisis” was never about border control. It was about ethnic cleansing — dressed up as policy.
The strange thing about the current rise of xenophobic authoritarianism is that it seems to have little basis in economic circumstances (while in the past it rose primarily during times of mass unemployment).
Is it just the case that the Brexit referendum was the harbinger of a new politics based on liberalism vs authoritarianism, as opposed to the socialism vs capitalism conflict that used to dominate?
Or reality vs fantasy. It is not economic decline that motivates people, it is the sense that their own place in the social order is under threat from people who they consider to be their inferiors. Add to that the constant stream of horror stories they get fed from around the UK and the world they have a sense of existential crisis, even though Sainsbury’s is as well stocked as ever