When will Starmer see sense on small boats?

Labour’s approach to tackling the small boats crisis is based around a dichotomy so overly simplistic that it should not fool even an averagely intelligent child. Keir Starmer set it out in an article for the Sun newspaper in July: the people in the boats are innocent victims, the people arranging for the boats to be there for them to get into at the appointed hour are evil and must be hunted down.

Starmer pledged to ‘smash the vile criminal gangs that profit from illegal immigration’. ‘Every week vulnerable people are overloaded onto boats on the coast of France. Infants, children, pregnant mothers – the smugglers do not care. They’re making a fortune, breaching our borders,’ he wrote.

So there we had it: the smugglers were the ones breaching UK borders, while those paying them for a berth in a boat – mainly adult males actually – were absolved of any responsibility for actually being the ones immigrating illegally.