Small boat Channel crossing deaths are rising - there's only one solution to this mess

The number of channel deaths is on the rise. This year alone there have been 54 people drown whilst making the crossing, way up on the 12 fatalities last year.

The number of illegal migrants breaking into our country is not abating either. This year's total will surpass the entirety of 2023 crossings in the next few days.

This all points towards the chronic failure of our politicians and Home Office to recognise what the actual solution to this crisis is. We need a deterrent, and an incredibly firm one at that.

Recent reporting by the BBC, in which an undercover journalist in Germany documents the decentralised and sophisticated means through which the people smugglers operate, makes it perfectly clear to any right-thinking person that "smashing the gangs" is not a credible prospect.

The report shows that, at every step of the operation, the organised criminality is two or three steps ahead of the authorities. Whether it's the use of agents to process the migrants' cash payments, the covert transportation of vessels from Turkey, stored discreetly in German warehouses, and then driven up to the French coast, or the highly secretive means through which the gangs communicate with their customers, the take home message is that Yvette Cooper and Keir Starmer are failing.

And that is because they have misdiagnosed the problem. These gangs are charging just £1,660 and have plenty of prospective customers. Even if continental authorities are able to pop a couple of dinghies, or confiscate a few engines, this simply means that the gangs will cram a few more migrants on those boats that are not detected.

The sight of people turning up on Kentish beaches is an affront to our country's laws and sovereignty. The fact there are around 1.2million illegal migrants currently living in Britain makes us all less safe. The Labour Party's amnesty for tens of thousands of illegal migrants has effectively endorsed criminality. The multi-billion-pound annual budget wasted on housing and feeding migrants has meant that British pensioners are having their fuel allowance ripped out of their hands.

This is a morally indefensible state of affairs, and one which perpetuates the very problem the government tells us they are trying to solve. Britain is now a soft touch in the eyes of many would-be migrants.

We are the land of milk and honey, where there is little risk of deportation, an almost guaranteed likelihood of being awarded refugee status, with access to benefits, and in the interim a luxury stay in a seaside hotel.

The people smugglers are frankly smarter and more determined than our politicians.

Until we have a government that actually wants to solve the problem, rather than produce platitudes that satisfy the Refugee Council and left-wing lawyers, then the gangs are going to continue amassing small fortunes.

Robert Bates is a Research Director at the Centre for Migration Control