Burnham refuses to set target date to end small-boat crossings, blames Brexit
The Prime Minister told BBC South East he would not set a date or promise to end Channel crossings after 83,000 small-boat arrivals since Labour took power, pointing to the loss of EU-era cooperation.
Andy Burnham has refused to set a target date or make a promise to end small-boat Channel crossings, telling BBC South East that “you’ve got to keep working towards that” but that he would not repeat other governments’ deadline pledges.
When pushed on whether he could stop the crossings, the Prime Minister said: “I do point to the loss of collaboration with neighbours that came with Brexit. That hasn’t helped. We had a more… cooperative system, if you like, in the past, so we are not able to have the same levels of collaboration that we used to have, but I don’t put that forward as a reason why we won’t keep working until we get the crossings right down.”
“That is our goal, that we don’t want to see any crossings at all,” he added. “I’m not going to give you a date by which we can do that, or a promise that we will do it, as other governments have done in terms of a particular deadline.”
The interview came as small-boat arrivals since Labour won power in July 2024 passed 83,000 — more than the size of the British Army, according to The Sun. Independent reporting puts the total at 83,279.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage accused Burnham of being “clueless on policy detail”, saying: “Before Brexit we had agreements that meant that we took more people than we sent back. Many people voted for Brexit because the British public wanted to control our borders.”
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp called the Brexit argument “total nonsense”, saying Burnham was “gaslighting us all to hide his own failures” and arguing the only way to stop the crossings was to leave the European Convention on Human Rights and deport arrivals — “the one thing that weak borders Burnham will never do”.
Burnham’s comments came at the end of a week in which he met Donald Trump and ahead of Labour’s party conference in Liverpool. He also ruled out an early election, telling the BBC: “Not particularly. No, I’m not… No, no election any time soon.”
Sources
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