France's shallow commitment

On Saturday, a record 1,378 people crossed the Channel in small boats in one day. That brings this year’s total to over 14,800, a 42 percent rise on 2024. According to The Times, Britain is on track to break every previous record for illegal crossings. France, meanwhile, intercepted just 184 of them.

This is what £480 million buys you in Macron-world: a couple of beach patrols, a shrug from the interior ministry and a line of French police politely watching the surf from the sand. Defence secretary, John Healey called the scenes “pretty shocking”. The boats aren’t even launching any more and, instead, smugglers “come round like a taxi to pick them up”.

In February, French interior minister Bruno Retailleau promised to change the law so police could intervene in shallow waters. Yet here we are in June, and the same legal excuse gets wheeled out every time another flotilla drifts toward Dover. Perhaps Paris finds the hold-up legally awkward. Perhaps it just prefers the problem on our side of the Channel.

British ministers now gamely talk of a new “Border Security Command”. But this is more a failure of nerve and diplomacy than a failure of enforcement. France is not keeping its word. Britain is not demanding it does. And the traffickers, as always, are laughing all the way to the bank.

How many more “record days” will it take before someone realises we’ve subcontracted our border to a country that has no intention of defending it?