Mark White analysis: Small boats will simply keep coming and I'm not convinced Sir Keir will ever 'smash the gangs'

Yet, it's these largely flat calm conditions that allow people smugglers to push out their small boats packed with hundreds of migrants.

More than 800 arrived in just two days, others tried to make the voyage but were forced to turn back as the flimsy vessels were too overloaded to make any headway.

But the last half a dozen years have taught us that those who don't make it across today will simply try again tomorrow, or the next day.

With 5,000 having crossed in the less than six weeks Labour have been in power, Sir Keir Starmer must be realising just how intractable the Channel crisis is.

Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak all tried and failed during their time in Downing Street to stop the boats.

Indeed, Stop the Boats was the very slogan Rishi Sunak chose to use as one of his five key pledges in office.

Such a very public commitment to end illegal Channel crossings was always going to be hostage to fortune.

And sure enough, he got nowhere near solving the crisis.

He did stubbornly stick to his "plan" for the Rwanda deterrent scheme, to provide a safe third country to send small boat migrants to.

We're told the first flights were to leave for the East African nation within days of the general election.

We'll never know whether that Rwanda programme would ever have proved to be the deterrent Rishi Sunak was convinced it would be.

The scheme is now history, scrapped on Sir Keir Starmer's first day in office, hundreds of millions of pounds down the drain.

But maybe now, Sir Keir Starmer has created his own hostage to fortune, by putting his reputation firmly behind a pledge to "smash the gangs".

To me, that task seems almost impossible.

For decades, law enforcement across the globe has tried and failed to smash the organised crime gangs controlling the international drug trade.

They have their regular successes, multi-million pound drug busts, and numerous arrests.

But the drug cartels just factor those losses into their business model.

There are key parallels between the organised drugs gangs and the organised people smuggling crime groups.

Both are multi-billion pound businesses, they're highly sophisticated in their operations, and span many countries.

Labour plans to give the fledgling Border Security Command new terrorism powers to make its law enforcement efforts more effective.

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But powers hatched in Westminster mean little on the international stage when only the complete cooperation of other nations will allow the new unit to operate effectively.

Countries will often agree on a level of cooperation and intelligence sharing, but allowing UK law enforcement to track down and disrupt criminal networks on their sovereign soil is likely to be a step too far for many.

Undoubtedly, the Border Security Command will have its successes in disrupting and prosecuting some of those involved in the people smuggling operations.

But I’m not convinced it’ll ever live up to Sir Keir's ambitious pledge to “smash the gangs.”

And for the foreseeable, until that new Command is fully operational, the boats will simply keep on coming - 5,000 now, 6,000 soon enough.