You can’t fix illegal immigration by legalising it — but that’s exactly what Labour’s treaty with France does. Keir Starmer’s much-trumpeted “one in, one out” migration deal with France isn’t a solution — it’s a smokescreen. Behind the diplomatic pageantry, this treaty does precisely the opposite of what the public has been promised. Instead of stemming the surge of illegal Channel crossings, it institutionalises them — and hands the smuggling gangs exactly what they want.
The Home Office is spinning this scheme as a deterrent. In reality, it’s a quota system that legitimises criminal behaviour. We send back 50 who arrived illegally and import 50 more from the same lawless routes — just with fresh paperwork and a different bus stop. This is not what enforcement looks like. Worse still, the treaty offers criminal networks a predictable framework to exploit.
The message to the gangs couldn’t be clearer: keep sending the boats — Britain will take them, one way or another. Far from “smashing the gangs,” it creates a stable, state-sanctioned market for their business model.
No serious effort is being made to close the launch points in France, where boats depart daily under the nose of the French authorities. Britain keeps pouring hundreds of millions into Macron’s “cooperation,” yet not a single credible disruption has materialised. The result? Record crossings, spiralling costs, and a Home Office reduced to glorified logistics — facilitating illegal migration while pretending to manage it.
And the scale of this farce becomes even clearer when you look at the numbers. This scheme proposes to remove just 50 migrants per week. Meanwhile, in some cases, over 1,000 arrive across the Channel each day. By the time this deal has removed 2,600 people in a year, well over 40,000 to 50,000 will have entered illegally — and every one deported will simply be swapped for another.
Nothing is being solved. We’re not reducing numbers — we’re legitimising them through a bureaucratic shell game. Even more insulting is the moral doublethink underpinning this treaty. Those arriving illegally under this system are still lawbreakers.
They’ve crossed our borders without permission. But instead of treating them as criminals, this government will process them into legal status — simply because they’re part of a “swap.” The rest will be put up in hotels, funded by the taxpayer, with access to benefits that law-abiding citizens increasingly can’t secure for themselves.
It won’t deter illegal migration — it will fuel it. Traffickers will be emboldened, not defeated. And the burden will fall squarely on working Britons, watching their taxes and communities eroded by a system that refuses to enforce its own borders.
Starmer and Macron may pat themselves on the back for a “breakthrough,” but in reality this treaty is nothing but the transfer of British sovereignty to the EU. We are agreeing to take migrants we didn’t invite, from a process we don’t control, under quotas we can’t limit. That is not control — it’s capitulation.
Starmer wants headlines in Brussels, not outcomes for Britain. He wants applause from foreign elites, not protection for our citizens. This treaty is the clearest proof yet: the political class is more concerned with performance than principle.
Because until we stop the boats — for real — this crisis will only escalate. Public patience is gone. Tensions are at boiling point. The only thing this treaty guarantees is more crossings, more chaos, and more betrayal.