Keir Starmer's first month in power sees more than 3,500 English-channel migrant crossings

One month on, the Prime Minister found himself battling riots triggered by the killing of three girls in a knife attack in Southport.

Views on immigration and asylum have influenced many of the protestors who have been protesting across the country for eight days.

Illegal boat migrants, year to date

After Rishi Sunak's vow to "stop the boats" failed, Labour made a different promise to "smash the criminal boat gangs".

On his first day in office, Sunak scrapped the previous Government's Rwanda scheme stating it was "dead and buried before it started" and had "never been a deterrent".

Instead, Labour's manifesto said it would create a new Border Security Command with the Government promising to put millions of pounds of extra funding into the body and provide it with hundreds of extra officers.

But, in Labour's first month in power, 3,595 illegal migrants crossed the English Channel, according to Facts4EU.Org.

This increases the number of illegal boat migrants this year to date to 17,169 compared to 12,772 in the same time period last year.

Figures from the Home Office show last year, 29,437 migrants made the journey to the UK, down 36 per cent from a record 45,774 arrivals in 2022.

Rob McNeil, the deputy director at Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, said that beyond Labour's scrapping of the Rwanada plan, there was little in Starmer's plan so far to "smash" the smuggling gangs.

McNeil said: "The devil is going to be in the operational detail here and we don’t see a lot about what it actually means to implement counter-terror powers.

"What we can see at the moment is something that is not vastly different to the existing Stop the Boats policy, which was also that you need to deal with the criminal side.

"Which is a completely legitimate approach, but that doesn’t mean it will stop the boats."

McNeil also pointed out that for the policy to succeed, an agreement would need to take place to return migrants arriving in Britain to where they came from.

Starmer promised to pursue such agreements with the European Union but many countries in the bloc are not interested in a deal.

The Prime Minister is likely to have more luck delivering on legal migration, pledging in his manifesto to "reduce" overall numbers of arrivals.

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By default, Starmer is likely to benefit from the previous Government's decision to tighten the UK's visa regime which the new Home Secretary has indicated Labour will follow through with.

The Office for National Statistics projected net migration could halve from 764,000 last year to 315,000 by the start of 2028 as a result of these changes.

The Home Office has said it is the first duty of the Government to secure its borders and they have already entered the recruitment process for a highly skilled Border Security Commander to protest borders.

A Home Office spokesperson said: "We all want to see an end to dangerous small boat crossings, which are undermining border security and putting lives at risk.

"The new Government is taking steps to boost our border security, setting up a new Border Security Command which will bring together our intelligence and enforcement agencies, equipped with new counter-terror-style powers and hundreds of personnel stationed in the UK and overseas, to smash the criminal smuggling gangs making millions in profit."