As your leader showed, the number of people arriving on small boats is minuscule in the overall immigration context (“‘Small boats week’ chaos reveals a bankrupt strategy”). The vast majority of annual UK immigrants come here for work or study or are admitted on humanitarian schemes, such as those for Afghan, Ukrainian or Hong Kong citizens, set up and sponsored by the government itself. According to the Home Office’s own figures, small boat arrivals accounted for just 40,000 asylum claims in 2022 – fewer than half the number of people who claimed asylum in total, and negligible in comparison with the overall 600,000-plus immigration total for the year.
Government focus on small boat arrivals is a deliberately cruel and naked ploy to stir up the Tory right and distract public attention from its abject and life-threatening failures on the economy, NHS, cost of living, housing and education. It should be called out for engendering racism and xenophobia, and the figures publicly set against the far, far larger numbers of those absorbed completely uncontroversially by the UK every year. Small boat arrivals are not a threat, still less the “invasion” claimed by Suella Braverman.
Don Keller
London N15
