by Rakib Ehsan, spiked
The political class can no longer get away with putting the comfort of illegal migrants above the concerns of citizens.
Over the past year, public frustration and anger has reached boiling point over the British state’s ongoing failure to tackle the small-boats crisis.
Despite its pre-election promise to ‘smash the gangs’ smuggling migrants across the English Channel, Keir Starmer’s Labour government has actually overseen an increase in small-boat arrivals. In the year ending September 2025, a total of 45,659 migrants arrived illegally on our shores. This marked a 53 per cent increase on the previous year, this is very close to the record set in 2022.
Public discontent over illegal migration has been fuelled not only by the number of new arrivals, but also by the state’s generosity towards some of them. Many migrants are housed in hotels – in some cases, four-star establishments like the Suites Hotel in Knowsley, Merseyside, where violent unrest broke out in February 2023. The authorities’ decision to use hotels to host asylum seekers has come at huge expense to the taxpayer, costing £2.1 billion – an average of about £5.8million per day – between April 2024 and March 2025. It also deprives many communities of a much-valued local asset, a venue hitherto used for anything from wedding receptions to birthday parties.
To compound matters, the Home Office has been dispersing illegal migrants in some of the poorest parts of the country, largely because accommodation is cheaper there. Predictably, this has been the source of a great deal of local tension, with asylum seekers seen living state-funded lives in hotels while locals struggle amid deprivation and scarce social housing.