It appears that Keir Starmer may have joined the long list of recent prime ministers who have failed to persuade the French to fix the small boats problem.

On paper, the Prime Minister’s proposal — deport everyone who crosses illegally from France and take one person with a proven connection to Britain in exchange — had some merit.

Yes, “one out, one in” does mean that the total number of people arriving wouldn’t change, at first. But if it deterred illegal crossings, they would likely fall over time.

The problem, of course, is making a credible deterrent, and here Starmer, like Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda plan before him, appears to have failed, and for the same reason: their respective deals don’t shift the odds enough to stop people getting in the boats.

Anyone prepared to risk their life in the Channel needs to be really sure they won’t get to stay here. But in both cases, the initial deportation numbers are or were well below the number of people crossing. (Starmer’s current deal is “17 in, one out”.)

Cue a renewed round of rage at the French. But Emmanuel Macron was quite right when he said, yesterday, that the United Kingdom is very much at fault. Sadly, his message is one our politicians — perfectly happy to pay Paris hundreds of millions of pounds for partial fixes — don’t want to hear.

The message? That a major driver of our illegal immigration problem, perhaps even the single most important one, is that state policy simply makes Britain a very attractive destination for illegal migrants.

Unlike many European countries, we have neither a contribution-based welfare system nor a national identity card. This means that people who get here can be much more confident of receiving benefits (up to and including social housing) or, if they don’t receive asylum, escaping into the black economy.

Combine that with courts which seem often to bend over backwards to refuse deportations, plus non-policy factors such as having the world’s most common second language as our mother tongue, and it’s no surprise so many people make the United Kingdom their destination of choice, even if it means a dangerous Channel crossing.

In fact, the real proof of the problem isn’t the Channel. Remember the Government’s woeful deal on the Chagos Islands? One of the reasons given for handing them over is that it has become a destination for illegal migrants.

Those not intimately familiar with the region’s geography might not realize how insane that fact is. The Chagos Archipelago comprises the most remote permanently-inhabited islands on Earth. Its nearest neighbour, Mauritius, is about 400 miles away. For it to have a problem with illegal immigration is absurd. But it does.

That, unfortunately, is the power of the pull factors drawing migrants here. Yet even as the crisis mounts, neither of the major parties has talked seriously about addressing them. The Conservatives paid huge sums to France and hoped for the best; Labour is literally paying Mauritius to take a valuable base off our hands.

Yes, the French police could probably stop all the boats if they tried. But it’s hard to blame French politicians for being frustrated that Britain’s stubborn refusal to change its policies has turned their northern coast into an illegal migration magnet. We’d be furious if the situation were reversed.

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Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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