Friday briefing: Why Keir Starmer hopes this is the year to end the Channel crossing crisis

Good morning.

The number of people crossing the Channel to the UK in small boats rose by 25% in 2024 compared with the previous year, according to official figures. Over the past seven years, the numbers have risen dramatically – from 299 people arriving in 2018 to 36,816 migrants risking their lives in 2024.

While the number of crossings remains lower than the record 45,774 in 2022, 2024 proved the deadliest year yet, with

at least 69 reported deaths

. The Starmer government has repeatedly vowed to tackle the crisis by dismantling smuggling gangs. However, many experts remain sceptical.

In response,

Labour has unveiled a new “interim order”

that would impose mobile phone bans, social media blocks and travel restrictions on suspected traffickers before any conviction. Breaking these orders could result in a five-year prison sentence. Further details will emerge in the coming weeks when the measure is published as part of the border security bill.

For today’s newsletter, I spoke with Jon Featonby, chief policy analyst at the Refugee Council, about these concerning figures and whether the strategy of targeting gangs is actually saving lives. That’s right after the headlines.

Five big stories

1. New Orleans attack

   | Nearly a year before he allegedly killed 14 people and injured dozens more by driving a pickup truck flying an Islamic State flag through a crowd of New Year’s revellers in New Orleans, Shamsud-Din Jabbar expressed his beliefs that music, intoxicants, sex and other pleasures were

   evils deserving of destruction

   .

2. South Korea

   | South Korea’s political crisis took a dramatic turn on Friday when investigators were forced to

   abandon an attempt to arrest the impeached president, Yoon Suk Yeol,

   after a tense standoff with his security forces.

3. UK news

   | Ministers are to launch a

   historic independent commission

   to reform adult social care, as they warned older people could be left without vital help and the NHS overwhelmed unless a “national consensus” was reached on fixing a “failing” system.

4. US news

   | The driver of the Tesla Cybertruck that caught fire and exploded in Las Vegas outside one of the hotels in Donald Trump’s business empire has been identified as Matthew Livelsberger, a US army veteran from Colorado,

   who died in the incident

   .

5. Grenfell Tower fire

   | More than a quarter of firefighters exposed to toxic smoke during the Grenfell Tower fire

   have had long-term health disorders, a study shows

   . Ministers are facing demands for an urgent review after data from 524 firefighters who risked their lives at the 2017 disaster showed that over the first three years, 136 reported life-changing conditions, including cancers, neurological disorders and respiratory diseases.

In depth: ‘If the focus continues solely to be on enforcement, the number of people dying will be even higher’

The causes of steep increases in crossings vary from year to year but there are overall trends that account for the rise. According to the latest Conflict Intensity Index, the proportion of the world engulfed by conflict

has grown 65%

over the last three years. The global refugee population increased by 7%

to 43.4 million last year

and as of June 2024

an estimated 122.6 million

people around the world were forced to flee their homes. “We know that since 2021 the top nationalities of people crossing the Channel year on year include people from Afghanistan, Iran, Eritrea, Sudan, Syria – it’s quite clear why people are being displaced from these places and why they are seeking safety,” Featonby says.

***

Will the new interim order work?

Featonby points out that it is difficult to know what the outcome of the new interim order will be without seeing the full details once the legislation is published and starts to progress through parliament.

They will affect a number of serious offences including trafficking, drug smuggling, money laundering and firearms offences. Labour’s hope is that the strategy will make it more difficult and expensive for traffickers to smuggle people into Britain. It may have some impact in bringing traffickers to justice, but there is little evidence to suggest that it will make much material difference to the number of people crossing the Channel. This kind of deterrence has little impact on people’s behaviour (as Kenan Malik

wrote in the Observer

more than eight months ago). Punishing those who run smuggling gangs is part of the puzzle to dealing with the small boats crisis – but it is still only one piece.

***

The limitations

Featonby says there are a number of concerns about the government’s plans. “Previous measures that target smugglers have also actually ended up targeting the people in the boats who are trying to reach the UK,” he says. The Nationality and Borders Act, for instance, ended up targeting people who were found to be steering the boats that were carrying people,

regardless of whether they were involved

in any further trafficking activity. One report found that hundreds of people, including children and victims of trafficking and torture, have been convicted and jailed for arriving in the UK in small boats to claim asylum.

“More broadly, our concern would be that although it is obviously the right thing to do to try and target the smugglers who are taking advantage of people, it is not clear that those types of enforcement measures are actually going to make a meaningful impact on the number of people who are putting their lives at risk,” Featonby says. Even if a small number of smugglers are found and brought to justice, he adds, “it seems likely that others will pop up to fill those gaps” because it is so lucrative.

The majority of people who arrive in the UK by small boats end up claiming asylum, “which is why we’ve said that anything to do with enforcement needs to be part of a far wider set of measures that has a focus on the expansion of existing [safe and legal ways] and the creation of new safe and legal ways for people to reach the UK, to give those people a real alternative to putting their lives at risk in small boats,” Featonby says.

***

What are some examples of safe routes?

Last year’s US election was dominated by immigration and concerns about a crisis at the southern border, which prompted

some hardline policies

to maintain the appearance that the Biden White House was tough on immigration. Despite this messaging, Featonby notes there is growing evidence that it was a sponsorship programme creating safe and legal routes for 532,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans – along with a refugee resettlement scheme offering 24,000 new places – that

led to a reduction

in irregular migration.

Another route to reducing the number of small boat crossings is to make it easier for people to join their families already in the UK. While it is possible for some people to join family members with refugee status, it is limited: only an adult refugee who is already in the UK is able to sponsor their closest family members, such as their spouse or any dependents.

“One of the things that we’ve been calling for is for children with refugee status in the UK to be able to sponsor their parents to come and join them,” Featonby says.

The boldest and newest idea being pushed by the Refugee Council is the introduction of 10,000 refugee visas that target the nationalities which are most likely to get on those small boats in high numbers. People would be able to put in a claim in the region where they live.

“That would be a safe and legal process where the UK government knows exactly who is arriving, that person’s travel is facilitated for them to get to the UK, and then they go through the asylum system once they’re here,” he adds. “Our concern is that if the focus continues solely to be on enforcement, the number of people dying in 2025 will be even higher.”

What else we’ve been reading

• Yngvild Aspeli is staging Herman Melville’s novel

  Moby-Dick through puppetry

  at this year’s MimeLondon festival.

  Sanjoy Roy gets the inside scoop

  on how wood, foam and papier-mache are breathing new life into the classic story.

  Jason Okundaye, assistant editor, newsletters

• Hannah Marriott’s deep dive

  into the rocketing popularity of

  extreme workouts

  is fascinating: the cult-like atmosphere, the dimly lit club vibe, and the eye-watering price tags are all part of the experience – but it also comes with a troubling obsession with thinness.

  Nimo

• A quarter of a century into the millennium, how has the

  current state of sport

  shaped up with predictions about the future? The late

  Guardian football correspondent David Lacey

  was “eerily accurate” about the arrival of video assistant referees in football, whereas Telegraph sports reporter Owen Slot was wrong to sound the death knell for boxing and cricket.

  Jason

• “Live ones go in paper bags, dead ones in the freezer”:

  Phoebe Weston’s piece

  follows the Toronto volunteers who set out at dawn to rescue the

  migrating birds

  that fly into windows.

  Nimo

• New year resolutions

  are broadly more resilient as a concept than reality – sure, sometimes they’re followed through, but for the most part they’re wishful thinking.

  As Moira Donegan writes

  , accepting that “we remain the same jumble of indulgences and weaknesses” after the clock strikes midnight, perhaps we should do away with resolutions altogether?

  Jason

Sport

Football

| Carlo Ancelotti

has refused to be drawn

on Real Madrid’s pursuit of the Liverpool defender Trent Alexander-Arnold. The Champions League holders were rebuffed when they made an initial inquiry about the England right-back’s availability a few days ago.

Darts

| With an average of 105, Luke Littler arguably didn’t showcase his very best but still

sailed past

Stephen Bunting 6-1 in the semi-finals of the PDC world championship to set up a mouthwatering final with Michael van Gerwan, who beat Chris Dobey 6-1.

Skiing

| The Polish world-class ski jumper Andrzej Stekala began the new year with a public coming out and a message mourning his partner

whom he lost in November

. The 29-year-old wrote on his Facebook page that for years he was hiding the truth about being gay for fear it could be destructive for him. On Wednesday he wrote that he wanted his fans and the public to know “who I really am”.

The front pages

The

Guardian

leads on “Ministers plan biggest shake-up of social care for decades”. The

Times

, in contrast, says “Reform of social care is pushed back again”. The

Mail

reports “Pay of NHS managers soars £1.1bn”.

The

Financial Times

reports “Insipid growth means tax rises are almost inevitable, economists warn”.

i

says “Millions face bill to install heat pumps in net zero push”. The

Telegraph

splashes with “Labour blocks grooming gang probe”.

Something for the weekend

Our critics’ roundup of the best things to watch, read, play and listen to right now

TV

The Traitors series three | ★★★★★

For those who still believe reality TV can be truly edifying, The Traitors is manna from heaven. The light it sheds on how people lie and how easily others are taken in, how barely perceptible slips can give people away, and how fast herd mentality and conspiracy theories can take hold has real sociological worth. There’s a sheen of niceness that still clings to the UK version (many bumbling apologies are exchanged during witch-hunts), but for all its cosy aesthetics, there’s nothing warm and fuzzy about this programme. Loyalty and kindness are invariably taken advantage of; intelligence and difference are threats to be neutralised.

Rachel Aroesti

Film

Nosferatu |

★★★★☆
Even by Robert Eggers’ usual standards, Nosferatu, a remake of FW Murnau’s 1922 German expressionist silent film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, is an unsettlingly atmospheric and richly realised work. There’s something about the macabre sensuality and mossy, crepuscular gloom of this retelling of the vampire legend that leaves a mark on the audience. It’s not so much a viewing experience as a kind of haunting.

Wendy Ide

Book

Cher: The Memoir, Part One

One thing that has always elevated Cher above most people in her fame bracket has been her ability to poke fun at herself. The voice of this memoir, which has somehow survived seven years of rewrites and many fired ghostwriters, sounds at least as authentic as her outbursts on X. The young woman in these pages is bouncy, guileless, sardonic, flip – and as keenly sensitive to her own absurdity as she is to that of others. “Oops,” she writes, when something bad happens. Of her entry into the music business: “I was utterly clueless.”

Emma Brockes

Music

Ethel Cain | Perverts | ★★★☆☆

Perverts essentially contains two kinds of track. The first, including the single Punish and closer Amber Waves, feel like the music on Preacher’s Daughter falling to pieces, their sound muffled and lo-fi, their structure stripped back to simple piano figures that repeat for the entirety of the song, their tempo slowed to an agonising crawl. On Punish, the whole song is eventually consumed by an electric guitar so distorted the chords are besides the point; it’s essentially a wall of obliterating noise. Vacillator is one of the few tracks to feature drums – it has a beautiful melody, but the actual music seems to be made up of ghostly echoes of instruments rather than instruments themselves, the sonic equivalent of seeing a vapour trail but not the plane that made them.

Alexis Petridis

Today in Focus

How Britain fell in love with darts

Helen Pidd

attends the PDC World Darts Championship to find out why the sport has

grown in popularity

in recent years.

Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings

The Upside

A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad

While it has been known since the 1990s that Arctic bowhead whales can reach 200 years old, a new scientific study suggests that this lifespan may also apply to right and fin whales. This corroborates beliefs around the

lifespans of great whales

that have been held by oceanic peoples including the Inuit, Maōri and Haida. “The moratorium on hunting great whales, introduced in 1982, has helped populations of humpback and fin whales to increase. The report suggests that, without human predation, whales could regain their natural longevity.”

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