As Josef Stalin is supposed to have once cynically said, “One death is a tragedy: a million is a statistic.” If so, then here are some more statistics from the ever-filling modern-day sailors’ graveyard that is the English Channel. In early September, another 12 illegal immigrants, “primarily of Eritrean origin”, drowned off the French coast at Cape Gris-Nez, near Boulogne-Sur-Mer, when their dinghy flooded and sank.

Mainstream British media such as the BBC were very careful to inform the public that amongst them were “six children and a pregnant woman”, just to hit home how particularly tragic the whole scenario was.

And yet, let us be brutally honest, there will be many people out there in Britain who do not particularly view such events as tragedies at all, but regard them more with blithe indifference. Others, even less sympathetic, would no doubt actively prefer the migrants to die before they reach shore. Few may be willing to openly say so, though: doubtless they still remember the media monstering political commentator Katie Hopkins received back in 2015, when she argued in print that gunships should be sent to the Mediterranean to keep out those then fleeing Assad’s war-torn Syria using words like the following: “No, I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don’t care.”

In the end, after her article was deeply misrepresented, Hopkins was subject to a huge petition calling for her sacking as a newspaper columnist, received criticism from the UN Commissioner for Human Rights, and was reported to the police by the Society of Black Lawyers for the terrible crime of speaking her mind: by the time of her next column, Hopkins was contritely writing of how “No-one wants to see images of children drowned at sea, no matter what their journey or destination.”

The bounds of acceptable public debate about such things were adhered to more successfully by the current Labour Party Home Secretary Yvette Cooper who, back at the time, memorably promised to take a family of Syrians into her own private home – before later even more memorably neglecting to actually do so on the impeccably bureaucratic grounds that she had not received “proper support and training from local councils to be a proper fosterer” to such people.

In relation to last week’s deaths, the perpetually pained Cooper pulled her usual just-been-exposed-to-a-giant-onion sad face and called the drownings “horrifying and deeply tragic” before decrying those behind “this appalling and callous trade”, by which she of course meant France-based criminal people-smuggling gangs – but are the true ones to blame for such frequent occurrences actually very public bleeding hearts like her own good self?

Channelling the dead

That Britain is very much to blame is certainly the opinion of many on the French side of the Channel-cum-aquatic-graveyard. Jean-Luc Debaele, Mayor of the coastal town of Wimereux, which has seen its fair share of brine-bloated bodies over recent years, has consistently held liable successive British Governments, both Conservative and Labour, for making the country seem like an “immigrant El Dorado” by virtue of its excessively lax labour laws and social security benefits system.

“Why do the English welcome them? Why do they absolutely want to travel to England? These are the questions that need to be asked,” Debaele has said. “It is Britain that is responsible for the boats setting off across the English Channel and the deaths that occur in the sea. The English pay us to stop the boats setting off but they look after the migrants when they arrive on their shores. The English give them accommodation, food, a bank account, and let them work without regulation … This has been going on for more than 20 years … I have been mayor for four years and I've watched as more and more boats leave from these shores and more people die in the sea.” 

Debaele isn’t the only one to think this way. In 2022, French President Emmanuel Macron haughtily lectured UK authorities that “The British continue to have a system … which manages economic immigration through hypocrisy. There is no legal immigration route. The British must articulate their needs in terms of the economy and reopen a path to legal asylum requests. We are going to step up the pressure [upon them to do so].”

In other words, consecutive double-speaking UK Governments, encouraged both by domestic businesses eager for cheap labour, and the immigrant-loving charity and NGO sectors, have quietly been quite happy to facilitate the development of an illegal immigrant-based literal black economy in their nation, against the native general public’s express wishes, whilst pretending to try and stop it via various fake measures like the infamous Rwanda Scheme to fly seaborne invaders out to the African nation in question.

Once Keir Starmer’s Labour Party immediately scrapped the whole European Court of Human Rights-stymied plan upon coming to office in July, former Tory PM Boris Johnson wasted little time after the latest September drownings in accusing Sir Keir and his new Home Secretary Cooper of being “to blame for the drowning of kids at sea” by removing the supposed all-for-show Rwanda “deterrent”, a wholly unworkable plan which Boris had initially designed.

Yet you could argue Johnson himself was equally culpable for refusing to implement any genuine, non-performative, measures to stop the never-ending influx of small boats.

It is noticeable that, when criticising Labour here, Johnson still chose to frame his arguments upon the terms of those oh-so-humanitarian left-wing “No Borders” opponents of his who clearly wish to let anybody and everybody into the country regardless. The main salient feature of his nixed Rwanda Scheme, Boris lied, was that it was “designed to save lives at sea” by discouraging any illegals from sailing Dover-wards in the first place.

But this is not true: it was designed mainly to trick anti-immigration citizens into voting Conservative, not to “save lives at sea” at all. Whilst doubtless regrettable, the deaths of such people are not really the primary concern of all those disillusioned and since-vanished former Johnson-voters, for whom the main problem is not that immigrants keep dying – it’s that they keep landing here safely. If it was otherwise, then politicians like Johnson could just have taken the 2022 advice of Emmanuel Macron and opened mass legal migration routes into the UK instead: except if they had, the Tories would then have slid into even greater electoral oblivion to the Labour Party than they just did back in July.