Keir Starmer was skewered in a gruelling GB News rant as migrant crossings hit a record high for this year in a damning development for the Prime Minister’s ‘Smash the Gangs’ plan. On Tuesday (April 15), a record number of small boat migrants crossed the English Channel just days after the largest number this year made the illegal journey.
Provisional figures show around 700 migrants arrive in UK waters yesterday, surpassing the previous one-day record of 656 migrant arrivals. The latest crossings take the number of small boat migrants who have travelled to the UK this year to almost 9,000. These figures are around 40 per cent higher than the 6,265 who crossed the Channel at this time last year.
Eamonn Holmes returned to the helm on GB News alongside Miriam Cates (Image: GB News )
It makes for grim reading for the Labour leader, who promised the government would “smash the gangs” this year. On Wednesday (April 16), presenters Eamonn Holmes and Miriam Cates welcomed political commentator James Schneider onto the show to get his thoughts the latest figures.
At first, the broadcaster hit out at former Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak over his ‘Stop the Boats’ campaign. He began: “This is the problem with trying to manage a serious issue through a three-word slogan.
“Rishi Sunak tried to do it to create a big dividing line with the ‘Stop the boats’, and the thing is, you can only stop the boats if you do things that people don’t want to do. So, you could stop the boats if you were drowning more people in the [English] Channel but that would offend us very much.”
He then took aim at Keir Starmer for his ‘Smash the Gangs’ campaign. He fumed: “Keir Starmer has to have his equivalent, so it’s ‘Smash the Gangs’. But that suggests that the only reason why people are coming is because they are essentially being people trafficked which is not the case.
“My point is, if you want to deal with the issue of people crossing and how we deal with refugees and how we decide who’s a refugee and who isn’t, saying we’re just going after the gangs, that doesn’t solve the issue either.
“So if you did want to reduce the number of people who should gain support in our country, who should be gaining refugee status from taking this dangerous journey, then there needs to be ways in which asylum cases and refugee claims can be processed outside of Britain”.
It didn’t take long before fans flooded to X – formerly known as Twitter – to share their thoughts on the migrant crisis online. One user penned: “The solution to boats crossing the Channel is simple. all must be returned to safe France the same day. Genuine asylum seekers can claim there.”
Another agreed: “There is a safe legal route you muppet, it’s called a ferry and a passport just like us normal people” as a third echoed: “Stop the benefits – process and deport, that will stop the boats. It’s not hard.”
