When did the scale of illegal immigration into the UK via Channel dinghies become a first order political issue for you? Perhaps you were, like me, outraged by the phenomenon from the start. If so, you will have been reassured by Boris Johnson’s declaration at the outset of his premiership that those coming in this fashion would be ‘sent back’. There were 1,843 such arrivals in 2019.
Maybe your hackles rose at the end of 2020, when the Government confirmed that far from deterring the trade by implementing a successful returns policy, it had received another 8,466 irregular arrivals via dinghies during that year. Or, if you were relatively slow on the uptake, maybe you only became thoroughly irked at the end of 2021 when official figures recorded 28,461 such arrivals for the year.
It could even be that it has taken 40,000 such arrivals for the year to be chalked up this weekend – with 1,000 arrivals on Saturday – to persuade you that this is now a national emergency.
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