What — or who — is to blame for Britain’s border crisis? As tends to happen in politics, answers vary. According to the Conservative line while the party was in power, it was an aberrant force of nature. Since leaving office, the Tories have increasingly taken the view that it is instead the result of overstretched and out-of-date human rights infrastructure, in particular the European Convention on Human Rights.

For Keir Starmer, it was the failed “gimmick” of Rwanda, the scheme he almost immediately replaced after taking office. Embarrassingly, since then Channel crossings have reached a record pace. Saturday saw a record daily total of 1,195 people reach the UK via the Channel, and crossings are widely expected to climb above 50,000 this year.

Those at the other end of the Channel have yet another answer. Éléonore Caroit, a member of President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party in the French National Assembly, has pointed to Brexit as the cause of rising numbers, claiming that Britain’s departure from the European Union ended its returns agreement and exposed a “very weak asylum policy”.

In fact, the visibility of the Channel crossings — and the Government’s seeming inability to control them — means this is a belief which has some support in the UK, too. A poll conducted in 2022 — a record year for crossings, at a little over 45,000 — found that 73% of Britons believed the country had not had control over its borders since leaving the EU. A 2023 poll found that nearly half of voters felt Brexit had made it more difficult for the UK to manage asylum seekers crossing the Channel, while only one in five thought leaving the EU had made it easier. Even among Brexit supporters, 42% said it had made the situation harder, compared to just 23% who believed it had improved. Crossings that year totalled less than 30,000.

As numbers from the crossings mount, the reaction against Brexit seems to become more entrenched: a poll this year revealed 50% of Leave voters said Brexit has had a negative impact on immigration levels. This is helping drive a general dissatisfaction with the decision to leave the EU. Fewer than half of Brexit voters could identify a single positive outcome from the move, and only 8% said it has benefitted them personally. Meanwhile, nearly half of the public said they believed Brexit has had a negative impact on the country.

Despite his central role in delivering it, the public view that Brexit has failed to deliver on border control may primarily benefit Nigel Farage. This failure has created a vacuum — and the Reform leader has stepped into it, once again placing the blame for the boats squarely at the door of Number 10. Before it was the Tories; now Labour is to blame.

It’s a sound strategy. Polling from last week shows that Reform UK commands the highest level of public trust on immigration of any party, with 37% believing it has the right policies overall, 39% trusting it to handle Channel crossings effectively, and 42% confident it would make illegal entry more difficult. By contrast, only about one in four voters express trust in Labour or the Liberal Democrats on these issues. The Conservatives now rank lowest across all three measures. Trust in both major parties is in steep decline.

The dissatisfaction with how Britain’s main parties are handling migration may only deepen if they make the mistake of defining success as a return to pre-Boriswave levels of immigration — which both parties have already shown dangerous signs of doing. The immigration levels of the 2010s were significantly lower than those of the 2020s, but were still a primary driver of Brexit.

Part of the challenge is that public concern over migration doesn’t neatly divide between “legal” and “illegal”: the two are inextricably linked in voters’ minds. The Channel crossings have become a lightning rod for dissatisfaction with a broader system failure, reinforcing the belief that Britain’s borders are porous and poorly defended. With neither main party offering a credible alternative, and the public increasingly disillusioned, the man who helped bring about Brexit may be best placed to capitalise on its failure.

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Tom Jones writes at The Potemkin Village Idiot.

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