Invasion | Boat Migrants Who Have Entered England Now Outnumber British Soldiers | It’s an ARMY
Steve Watson | modernity.news
Britain now has more illegal Channel arrivals under the Labour government, which has been in power two years, than it has soldiers in the British Army.
Almost 90 percent of those intercepted since 2018 have been male; two-thirds are aged 18 to 39
Home Office figures put small-boat arrivals since Labour took office on 4 July 2024 at 83,279. The regular Army stands at 83,000.
On Wednesday alone, 781 people came ashore — the worst single day since Andy Burnham replaced Sir Keir Starmer as prime minister in July. The first three days of the week delivered 1,085 arrivals. Across 809 days of Labour government, that works out at roughly 103 people a day.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said the milestone speaks for itself. “Labour has let an entire army-sized population cross the Channel illegally,” he said. “More people have arrived in small boats than we have soldiers defending Britain. That is completely bonkers. Labour has lost control of our borders and seems utterly incapable of getting it back.”
Former Royal Navy officer Chris Parry went further. Labour’s intake, he said, amounts to six-and-a-half divisions of fighting-age men. “That’s more divisions than were in the Allied assault wave on D-Day,” he added, calling the crossings “amphibious operations against our coast.”
The comparison is worse when the rest of the services are brought in. Labour’s small-boat total already sits 15,429 ahead of the Royal Navy and RAF combined, which together field 67,850 full-time personnel. And this is only the post-election slice. Under the Conservatives, around 128,000 people arrived by dinghy. Since records began in December 2018 the running total has blown past 200,000 — higher than the combined strength of the Army, Navy and RAF.
Writing in the Mail after more than 1,200 people crossed from Monday, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said: “It is utterly insane. And if it wasn’t clear before, the events of the past few days have proved beyond any reasonable doubt that both Border Force and the Home Office have completely lost control.”
He added: “Years ago, I warned the small boats crisis would define this era of British politics. Predictably, the chin-stroking commentariat declared I was exaggerating. Well, look where we are now.”
“Ordinary Britons rightly ask if successive governments cannot stop people from arriving illegally in broad daylight, let alone under cover of darkness without detection, then what exactly is the point of having a border?” Farage asked. His party wants the largest military operation in the Channel since the Second World War and a return of every illegal arrival to France.
Two boats this week reached British beaches without Border Force interception — one at Samphire Hoe between Dover and Folkestone, another near Folkestone the day before. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood ordered an “urgent review” and said even one uncontrolled landing is “one too many.” Education Secretary Lucy Powell then told GB News that “you can’t stop everything all of the time,” while insisting Mahmood was taking “swift action to find out what’s gone wrong here and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Border Force union official Lucy Moreton was less diplomatic. Undetected landings are “absolutely, definitely happening,” she said, with abandoned vessels and reports “all the way down to Falmouth.” “If we don’t look for it, we don’t know it’s happening. We don’t know it’s happening, we don’t have to deal with it.”
Labour’s first act in 2024 was to scrap the Rwanda deterrent. Shadow energy secretary Andrew Bowie said the latest numbers follow from that choice. “We’ve got a government that is oblivious to the scale of the problem we face in the Channel,” he said. “It’s not a surprise, frankly, because the very first thing this Labour government did was get rid of any sort of deterrent to prevent illegal migrants coming into this country.”
Former Home Office borders director Glyn Williams told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that “the consequences of a failing policy… are becoming more and more extreme,” and that “more extreme measures” may now have to be considered.
The official line is that crossings are down 42 percent this year and that summer 2026 was the quietest since 2020. That is the defence ministers reach for while dinghies still beach in Kent and Britain discusses paying France another billion pounds for the next small-boats deal. GB News presenter Patrick Christys called the week “full-on illegal migrant carnage.”
The people coming off those boats do not vanish. They are processed, housed and parked on the public. We have already covered what that looks like on the ground. In Piddington, Oxfordshire — 350 residents, 46 children, no shop, no pub — a Home Office paper for the old MoD depot discussed 3,510 “service users” against an official planning figure of 1,256 single adult males. Ten migrants for every local.
Steve Watson
Similar dumps are lined up at Linton-on-Ouse, Barnham and Crowborough as hotels are emptied into former barracks.
The legal machine that then keeps them here is not a refugee system. It is a production line. A Home Office official who has handled thousands of cases put the genuine share at “at best 1 per cent.” Package stories, recycled police letters, staged nightclub photos, modern-slavery claims that cannot be disproved. Grant rates still run in the tens of thousands. Removals do not.
Steve Watson
Who helps keep the Channel route open is another story again. NGO networks on the French coast have spent years treating the crossing as a humanitarian project rather than a breach of an island nation’s border.
Migration Watch chairman Alp Mehmet urged “Military-age men are pouring into Britain across the Channel. Illegal Channel crossings are now a major political crisis, and pose a real and present threat to our national security.”
Almost 90 percent of those intercepted since 2018 have been male; two-thirds are aged 18 to 39. People-smuggling gangs have told reporters that Iran has used the route to move operatives in return for a “favour” once on British soil. In 2023, nineteen suspected terrorists linked to Islamic State and al-Shabaab were reported to have arrived the same way.
A country that cannot stop a dinghy in daylight does not have a border policy. It has a ferry service run by criminal gangs, underwritten by hotels, lawyers and a claims system that treats refusal as the hard option.
Labour inherited a failure and then dismantled the one deterrent it had. Burnham now inherits the same beaches, the same numbers, and an actual Army smaller than the cohort that has already washed up on his party’s watch.
Original Article: https://modernity.news/2026/09/26/boat-migrants-who-have-entered-the-country-now-outnumber-british-soldiers/
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