With migrant channel crossings nearing 900 a day, you don’t need a government report to know the current plan isn’t working. Deterrents aren’t deterring. Deportation threats aren’t sticking. The numbers are too big, the system too slow, the routes too fluid. And despite endless political promises, the boats keep coming.
Why? Because we’re only fighting migration from one end of the chain. The conversation is stuck at the border. But the real challenge: the strategic one – starts far further upstream.
Why are people leaving in the first place? Why are they handing over their life savings to criminal gangs for a dangerous crossing to Europe?
The answer is simple. Life back home is often miserable, unsafe, and without hope. With no prospect of improvements in security, the economy, or governance, people make the only choice left: to leave.
And much as we’d like to point fingers at French authorities, this is a European issue – as the 2024 Eurostat asylum seeker data makes clear: Germany: 230,695, Spain: 164,010, Italy: 151,120, France: 130,860, and Britain: 108,138.
Europe, we have a problem. And it’s not going away unless we’re willing to engage where it starts—at the sharp end.
Here’s the irony: that’s exactly what we used to do. Upstream engagement. Overseas aid. Soft power. Call it what you like. It worked.
To be clear, this isn’t about reckless interventions like Iraq or Afghanistan. However well-intentioned, those only fuelled more instability and migration.
This is about targeted, smart aid – often delivered with like-minded partners – that can help stabilise regions before they collapse.
Take Sudan. A brutal power struggle between two former allies, now turned warlords, has spiralled into a catastrophic civil war. Is it any surprise thousands are fleeing? This is where Britain once made a real difference.
We were global leaders in conflict resolution, diplomatic reach, and soft power.
But today, our aid budget has been slashed in half- to just £120 million. The U.S.? It’s pulled out entirely.
When these programmes are done right, they work.
Sierra Leone, Jordan (to prevent Syrian spillover), Ghana, Kosovo, Nigeria (Boko Haram), Tunisia, Even Iraq, more recently. These are examples where strategic aid kept nations from spiralling—and helped reduce migration.
Compare that to the £9 million a day hotel bill for Asylum seekers. Which strategy sounds smarter?
So why is the aid budget empty? Because much of it has been redirected to Defence.
Now, I’ve long called for a stronger defence posture. We could very well be at war in the next five years. But the threat landscape in the 21st century isn’t just about tanks and missiles.
Pandemics. Cyberattacks. Jihadi extremism. And yes -mass migration. These threats don’t get bombed into submission. They have to be prevented at the source. That’s where development aid comes in.
When we cut education programmes in Nigeria, pull back economic support in Ethiopia, or abandon conflict recovery in Sudan -we’re not saving money. We’re setting the stage for tomorrow’s crises.
Migration doesn’t begin in Dover. It begins in towns ravaged by drought, by jihadist violence, by corrupt or collapsed governments. In places where Russia or China are quietly moving in, exploiting resources while we step back. People don’t leave because they want to. They leave because they have no other option.
We need to bury the myth that Britain’s aid budget is just charity -or a luxury we can’t afford when things are tight at home.
It’s not. It’s national interest. Aid puts out fires before they reach our shores. It builds schools instead of refugee camps. It backs governments instead of people smugglers. It gives people a reason to stay—so they don’t feel forced to leave. Defence and aid are not rivals.
They are partners. Two sides of the same coin.
One projects strength. The other builds stability. Britain’s soft power is one of our greatest assets, our language, our institutions, our global networks. But it only counts if we back it with commitment.
That means restoring aid to its rightful place, not as a “nice-to-have,” but as a core tool of national security. Instability over there creates pressure over here. Migration, terrorism, pandemics – they don’t respect borders.
So yes, let’s back our armed forces. Let’s rebuild our military. But let’s also be smart enough to fight the next war before it starts- not after the damage is done.
We either shape the world -or we react to it.