100,000 people have crossed the English Channel on small boats since 2018, figures gathered exclusively by GB News have revealed.
Home and Security Editor Mark White said that the milestone was hit today after 250 people crossed the Channel early this morning.
Reacting to the news, James Murray MP, Labour’s Shadow Financial Secretary to the Treasury, told GB News: “Any milestone in terms of numbers of people crossing the Channel really underscores what a huge problem this is.
“I don’t think anyone needs any convincing that people crossing the Channel has surged in recent years, that it’s a really significant issue and needs to be tackled.
“What people want to see though is real solutions to tackling this problem and that’s why we’ve said that we would go after the people smugglers, the criminal gangs who are bringing people over in the first place to make sure that we cut off that source and make sure that they can’t profit from people crossing the Channel on boats.”
In a discussion with Isabel Webster and Stephen Dixon, he continued: “What we really need is…tackling the backlog in the asylum and immigration system, which we know is out of control, which we know is causing the government to use expensive hotels and barges and other forms of accommodation.
“We need that plan to get on top of the situation because, frankly, the Conservatives have presided over 13 years of failure on this and they’ve created this chaos which now needs to be fixed.”
Mark White told GB News that the situation seems like a “never-ending crisis” and that passing the 100,000 milestone is likely to derail the Government’s narrative that it is making progress on stopping the boats.
He added there are reports that six people had fallen from a boat this morning and that a rescue operation is underway.
