by David Shipley, The Critic
People smuggling is one of the few functioning markets left in the UK
Readers of The Critic will be painfully aware that the British economy is fake. As Chris Bayliss has written, “a range of caps, cross-subsidies, means-based pricing and interlocking entitlements via the universal credit system are making prices, and to some extent incomes, irrelevant”, and that’s before we consider the vast array of regulations and requirements loaded on every business in the land.
Every legal business that is, for just as British citizens experience anarcho-tyranny, so do its companies. Our high streets are full of organised-crime controlled enterprises which, as I wrote earlier this month, “often deal drugs from the premises, employ people who don’t have a right to work in the UK or who have been trafficked and forced to work as slaves, sell illegal or unsafe products, evade tax and have even been linked to child sexual abuse and exploitation”. Unsurprisingly, those businesses also ignore other laws, such as the requirement to pay business rates, file their accounts or abide by health and safety rules. The result is that they’re operating at a vast advantage to those traditional businesses which do obey the law.
And now, courtesy of the BBC, we have learned that a network of UK-registered businesses has been integrated into the people smuggling industry. According to their report, “people smugglers are directing migrants to pay for illegal Channel crossings using a network” of British companies including a car wash in Cambridgeshire and a phone shop in south-east London. When investigators went to the phone shop they were told that it would cost £2,700 for two people to enter the country via small boat. I found this detail particularly interesting, because it reveals the extent to which, despite all the noise about enforcement and “smashing the gangs” that people smuggling prices have collapsed over the last decade.