Starmer scrapped the Channel exchange, doubled the riot police, and left the crossings to the smugglers.
After 423 days the record is in. Roughly 40,000 people crossed the Channel in small boats while the one-in-one-out exchange ran with France. About 1,500 of them were sent back. Four percent. British Future, the thinktank that had championed the policy, calculated that to close the Channel as a viable asylum route the programme would have needed to run at twenty times its size. A machine that must grow twentyfold to function was never a machine. It was a promise kept for one press conference.
Those percentages are made of people, so I want to begin with the smallest ones.
Nearly a hundred children were misidentified as adults and detained as adults. Sit with what that sentence describes. A boy of fourteen, a girl of fifteen, held in an immigration detention system beside adult strangers, because an official looked at them and decided they were lying about their age. No hearing a child could follow. Nobody whose work it was to believe them. I grew up in a city where desks went empty after pre-dawn raids and the school day carried on as though the children had simply not come in. Children taken by the state do not stop existing. They stop being visible to us. That is what a misidentification is: it makes a child invisible to the one country that could have protected her.
And the ones who were sent back. Among the roughly 1,500 returned to France under the exchange, some were beaten by the smugglers they had fled. Diane Taylor, who has written about asylum for twenty-five years, said she had never seen as much suffering caused to refugees by a UK government policy, and described asylum seekers used as reluctant human shields to protect a border from others in the same predicament. Starmer said last July that it is right to offer a haven to those in most dire need. He said it into cameras, beside Emmanuel Macron, and that sentence now sits in the same file as a fourteen-year-old in an adult wing and a man beaten after being put back on the boat he had paid to escape. The gap between the words and the file is not a policy disagreement. My tradition has a name for it: pecado social, a sin committed by a system and not only by a hand. “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself.” That is not an instruction to administer a border more gently. It is a commandment about memory — you were the stranger, so you do not get to become the guard. And the rabbi the prophets lead to said it plainer still: I was a stranger and you did not welcome me. Not that you were unkind to me. Not that you failed to accommodate me. You did not welcome me.
In place of the exchange, the Home Office will double the riot police along the French coast. That is the governing party’s chosen answer: more force, aimed at the same bodies, at the same hour of the same morning. I will not call that sober enforcement, and I will not call it the bare minimum, because the bare minimum of a state’s conduct toward a frightened family is not measured in the size of its police line. I am not writing this from outside it. The country I belong to has run the same arithmetic on the Rio Grande — children held, families separated, returnees handed back to a crossing that can kill them — and my own Church has spent a generation discovering how little its teaching is ever asked to cost. When I name the Home Office I am naming something my polity does in its own language, with its own uniforms. To the officer sent to that beach before dawn: you will be told your job is order. Your job, in practice, is to look into a hull full of families at four in the morning and decide what they are. What would work is not a larger cordon. It is what the exchange was trying, badly, to be — a legal route in, a lawful process out, run at a scale that matches the problem, with a child’s age settled by someone qualified to judge it rather than by a uniform’s estimate. You can build that. It is not a fantasy. It was a door, and this government decided it was politically cheaper to nail shut.
Pope Francis stood on the quay at Lampedusa in 2013 and named the condition underneath all of this: we have fallen into globalized indifference, become used to the suffering of others — it does not affect me, it does not concern me, it is none of my business. Nearly a hundred children misidentified as adults is what that indifference looks like once it reaches a detention register. It looks like paperwork.
The security response is already reshaping the crossings, and the reshaping is measured in bodies. Longer launch routes from Normandy and Belgium mean more hours in open water, in the cold, on an engine that may not hold. Larger hulls — the so-called mega-dinghies — mean more people packed into one craft, so that when the craft fails, more people fail with it, children among them. Every unit of friction the state adds is paid by the one party with no alternative but to keep moving. That is not a logistics adaptation. It is a bill presented to the drowning.
Meanwhile the streets are doing their own policing. Protests targeting asylum seekers spread to Portsmouth this summer, at a port for boats that had come from Normandy. The head of MI5 warned this week that extremists holding anti-immigration views are increasingly likely to consider attacks on immigration centres and asylum hotels. Nigel Farage denied this month that a Reform government would authorise lethal force against Channel crossings; the denial is on the record, and so is the memorandum his party signed with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally this autumn. None of them holds the power that detained a hundred children. Le Pen may win the French presidency in April, and a France under her would end the returns that made the exchange an exchange — that is a foreseeable condition, not a surprise, and the government that built a policy resting on Paris’s domestic goodwill chose the dependency. The indictment belongs to the office that holds the pen and the budget: Starmer’s, and the Home Secretary’s. Four percent returns, more riot police, and a legal route closed — that is what the party of a kinder settlement has delivered, and no election in Paris excuses it.
Romero told the soldiers of his country that no one is obliged to obey an order against the law of God, that a conscience outranks a command of sin. I say the same, without contempt, to the officer on that beach and to whoever signs the next detention report: you can stop. The door is not locked from your side.
The exchange was small, and it was failing, and it was a door. This government nailed it shut and set a riot squad where the door had stood. The boats will launch again before dawn. A child will be on one of them, and that child will be a child, whatever the paperwork says.