Going into last year’s general election, Labour knew that the Rwanda Scheme was an expensive farce, and that Keir Starmer was going to scrap it. Like all the most dangerous will-o’-the-wisps, there was real light twinkling at the heart of this wrecker’s lantern. On Channel crossings, as on so much else, Rishi Sunak was busy defeating himself; all the Opposition had to do was watch.

Yet a more reflective Labour Party might have been haunted by the niggling thought that it would, at an increasingly imminent point, be in Sunak’s position. Shadow ministers might then have paid more attention to how and why the then-Prime Minister was failing, and perhaps thought about what they’d do instead. This is especially pertinent when one considers that figures reported this week show crossings increased by 25% year-on-year in 2024, and by over a third on the same basis in the six months since Labour took office.

Labour politicians might have noticed, for example, that the reef against which the previous government dashed itself time and again was the United Kingdom’s existing legal obligations, which conspire to make effective border control a practical impossibility. European nations do not seem to have this problem, despite being signed up to the same treaties — the first clue that Britain might be doing something wrong.

Sunak repeatedly chose what was supposed to be the path of least resistance, eschewing hardline proposals backed by Policy Exchange and the Home Office in favour of a watered-down programme which was supposed to get through the courts. When it didn’t, he had nothing left to offer.

The policy was also just designed badly. By applying the scheme to all illegal entrants, the already spectral threat of deportation to Rwanda was spread across far too many people to be an effective deterrent. Had it been applied only to people who crossed once the Act was in force, with a separate fast-track mechanism set up and resourced, the odds for those thinking about trying to cross the Channel would have been much worse.

Yet, as we move into the new year, Labour doesn’t seem to have taken any of these lessons onboard, or indeed come up with any serious plan for what it’s going to do about the problem. The party had a list of things it wanted to scrap — Rwanda, the Bibby Stockholm barge — but no replacements. What else but a lack of understanding can explain the abortive decision to start housing asylum seekers and other Home Office detainees in private rented accommodation all over the country? The same goes for promises to “clear the backlog” without a deportation plan, which can only mean rubber-stamping applications.

Britons are angry about hotels being rented out en masse by the Home Office, but that is an expression of the deeper anger about mass immigration in general and uncontrolled illegal migration in particular. Only the most unreflective bureaucrat could possibly think the public is merely angry on behalf of the poor bureaucracy having to handle immigrants.

The way forward is as clear for Labour as it was for the Tories. In the short-term, the Government should express-build an asylum estate so that those going through the system can be housed without imposing them on communities. It can then use the time bought to crack down on pull factors and speed up deportations.

Repeated promises to “smash the gangs” by, er, imposing social media blackouts are just displacement activity. So long as this Labour government shows itself to be fundamentally unwilling to tackle the roots of the problem, the number of crossings will only go up.

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Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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