Sir Keir Starmer likes to speak the language of control. Control of borders, control of systems, control restored after years of drift. Yet on the Channel beaches of northern France, where the dinghies still slide into the water with weary regularity, control is precisely what is missing — and the failure is not merely operational but political, moral and, increasingly, farcical.
At the centre of the impasse stands the French state, or rather its curious habit of promising firmness while delivering paralysis. Paris agreed, after months of British pleading and eight years of cheques totalling £800 million, to permit police to intervene against small boats in shallow waters. This was heralded as a breakthrough. It now looks more like theatre. The reality, exposed by police unions themselves, is that French officers will not act once a boat has migrants on board. The sea remains a legal and moral no-man’s-land, where responsibility dissolves and accountability is endlessly deferred.
The excuse is familiar and endlessly recycled: safety. Officers, we are told, fear prosecution if an intervention leads to injury or death. The image is carefully curated — gallant policemen confronted with overloaded dinghies filled with women and children, any decisive action risking catastrophe. It is a powerful argument, and one that conveniently absolves the French authorities of having to do very much at all. Yet it also masks a more uncomfortable truth: a state that refuses to enforce its own borders because doing so might carry legal risk has already surrendered the principle of enforcement itself.
France is not a fragile polity improvising under strain. It is a sophisticated republic with a formidable security apparatus, a navy, a gendarmerie, and some of the most intrusive policing powers in Europe. Its officers are not paralysed by legal niceties when dispersing protests, clearing migrant camps, or enforcing emergency laws. That the Channel should suddenly become a zone of helplessness stretches credulity. What we are witnessing is not incapacity, but choice.
The duplicity lies in the contrast between what Paris says to London and what it allows its institutions to do. Agreements are signed, communiqués issued, summits convened. Then the unions step in, the lawyers demur, prosecutors insist that criminal liability cannot be waived, and the entire edifice collapses into bureaucratic shrugging. Everyone, it seems, has a veto; no one has responsibility. The result is a policy designed to look tough while remaining exquisitely careful never to work.
For Britain, this would be galling enough if it were merely a diplomatic irritation. But it is compounded by the extraordinary passivity of Sir Keir Starmer, who appears to believe that writing stern letters to Emmanuel Macron constitutes a border strategy. His private missive last month, urging urgent action because there is “no effective deterrent in the Channel”, reads less like a demand than a plea. It is the language of a man who senses the weakness of his position and hopes politeness might compensate.
Starmer’s central political promise on migration has been competence. Not cruelty, not grand ideological gestures, but sober, effective management. Yet competence requires leverage, and leverage requires a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths. One of those truths is that France’s interests do not align neatly with Britain’s. The migrants are leaving French soil, but they are not settling there. The political cost is largely Britain’s; the immediate pressure is someone else’s problem. In that context, polite exhortations were never going to suffice.
Nor can Starmer hide behind the familiar mantra of “international cooperation”. Cooperation without enforcement is merely collusion in failure. Britain has paid handsomely for results that never materialise. Each new announcement of “prevented crossings” is carefully offset by the stubborn reality of rising arrivals — more than 37,000 last year alone. If this is success, it is success of a peculiarly abstract kind.
The Home Office’s response — that operational decisions are a matter for the French authorities — is an admission of impotence dressed up as diplomacy. It amounts to saying that Britain will continue to fund a system it cannot direct, influence, or meaningfully audit. Meanwhile, the smugglers adapt, launching boats from ever more discreet locations, confident that once a dinghy touches water, the odds tilt decisively in their favour.
The French navy, for its part, has washed its hands of the affair entirely, declining to intervene at sea for fear of being blamed if disaster strikes. This institutionalised buck-passing would be comic were the stakes not so high. Every delay, every refusal to act, is an invitation to traffickers and a betrayal of those genuinely fleeing persecution, who are herded into lethal vessels by criminal gangs exploiting Europe’s collective timidity.
What makes this episode particularly damaging for Starmer is that it punctures the central myth of his leadership: that seriousness alone is enough. It is not. Seriousness without resolve becomes managerial dithering. Promises without enforcement become platitudes. The public was told that a change of government would mean a change of outcomes. Instead, we are offered the same crossings, the same excuses, and the same weary insistence that progress is just around the corner.
France’s position is cynical, but at least it is coherent. It will act when it chooses, on terms that minimise its own risk. Britain’s position is neither. It is paying, pleading and pretending that goodwill will substitute for hard power. Until that changes — until London is prepared to say that endless cheques without results are no longer acceptable — the Channel will remain what it is today: a narrow strip of water exposing the hollowness of grand promises on both sides.
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