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The Chinese ‘super
dinghies’ smuggling more migrants into Britain than ever before
Larger, overcrowded vessels are pushing the Channel crisis into dangerous new territory, with record numbers attempting the perilous journey
At 40 feet long and
10 feet wide, they are the people smugglers’ equivalent of an ocean liner –
especially when heavily overloaded. Pictured in the Channel for the first time
yesterday was a new Chinese-made “super dinghy”, capable of ferrying scores of
migrants into Britain in a single crossing.
Loaded with around
100 people, the vessel left the French coast on Tuesday – just hours
before Sir Keir Starmer’s speech to the Labour Party conference, where he pledged to
end the “vile trade” of people trafficking for good. Just three days before,
another Chinese-produced super-dinghy had crossed with 125 people – the
largest-ever number to make the journey in a single vessel. The arrivals lay
bare Labour’s failure to stem the migrant crisis,
and make it clear that is no longer strictly a “small boats” problem.
“As long as the smugglers know that when people arrive here they can stay for good, they will add to the size of their boats,” says Alp Mehmet, chair of Migration Watch UK. “They know there’s lots of money in it and bigger boats means more money.”
The two super
dinghies were part of what officials fear may be a new armada of large-scale
people-smuggling vessels, defying government efforts to crack down on the sale
of boats to trafficking gangs. As part of Sir Keir’s pledge to “smash the
gangs”, the Government has worked with EU law enforcement to stop the import of
cheap inflatables – which fall short of seaworthiness tests – and asked China
to stop exporting outboard engines used by people smugglers. Amid great fanfare
in July, the Government also slapped sanctions on a Chinese firm, Weihai Yamar Outdoors Product Co, which was
advertising “refugee boats” for sale on its website.
However, dinghies of the kind used by traffickers
are still available for sale for as little as £1,000 on Alibaba, the Chinese
equivalent of Amazon, according to reports this week. And while most no longer
advertise themselves as being “migrant” boats, the vendors seem well aware who
their market is, with one advert showing a dinghy pulled up on a beach. Critics
argue that there is little to stop Chinese vendors simply re-advertising under
different names to avoid scrutiny from UK officials.
Most of the Chinese boat makers are in eastern port
cities like Qingdao, from where their products are typically shipped to Turkey
– itself a hub for people smuggling. They are then taken into the EU via
Bulgaria and often warehoused in Germany, where the large influx of Syrian and
Afghan migrants from 2015 has bequeathed a vestige of people-smuggling
infrastructure, before eventually being moved to northern France. 28 sec
Cracking down on
the industry has proved stubbornly difficult. At a global immigration summit in
London at Easter, big tech social media firms pledged to stop people smugglers
advertising services and wares on their platforms, but in practice enforcement
is hard. In December, the National Crime Agency also said it was in
“conversations” with Chinese counterparts to restrict the supply of outboard
engines. The agency has tried to make its case by pointing out to Beijing that
most of the hundreds of people trafficking boats and engines it has seized in
operations are Chinese-made. However, with relations between Britain and China somewhat
chilly, expectations of co-operation are limited.
The passengers on the two super-dinghies – who were picked up by Border Force vessels that intercepted them mid-Channel – bring the total number of small boat migrants to have made it to Britain’s shores this year to nearly 33,500. That equates with figures at the same point in 2022, a year which holds the grim record for the highest number of arrivals.
Since the start of the small boat crisis seven
years ago, the number of migrants per vessel has also skyrocketed. In 2018,
each boat carried an average of seven passengers; this year, the average is 61.
With the additional
numbers also comes additional danger. While most of the passengers are adult
males, the gangs will often cram a few women and children on as well, aware of
the tactical value of having “vulnerable” people perched on board. This can be
used to either deter French police vessels from
intercepting them and turning them back, or to prompt British vessels to pick
them up. But on the larger boats, the sheer number of people on board means
there is often a huge crush – at which point the “women and children first”
chivalry is forgotten.
On one vessel that
tried to bring 70 migrants across in September, French officials reported that
three people – including two children – had been found crushed to death at the
bottom of the boat. Two Somali women were found dead in
similar circumstances on another boat last weekend. The use of much larger
craft also deters passing commercial vessels from rescue attempts in genuine
emergencies, because of the risks involved in dealing at sea with a large,
panicking crowd.
As Migration Watch
UK pointed out last month, the 182,000 small boat migrants that have crossed
the Channel since 2018 now outnumbers the entire active and reserve strength of
the 180,000-strong British armed forces. Curbing the flow is central to Sir Keir’s
credibility, given that one of his first acts in office was to scrap the Tory government’s Rwanda asylum deal,
which was designed to deter crossings in the first place.
Asked about the “super dinghies” this week, Home Office minister Mike Tapp insisted that it showed the Government’s strategy to disrupt supply chains was working.
“We’re having success upstream in intercepting the
actual procurement of boat parts, which is why they’re using bigger ones,” he
told the BBC.
Critics, however,
are yet to be convinced. Tony Smith, a former Border Force head who favours a
return to the Rwanda strategy, argues that trying to “smash” people smuggling gangs
will be no easier than trying to destroy drug-trafficking
networks. As long as there is a demand for their services, he says,
there will be those willing to supply boats, no matter how much law enforcement
tries to stop them. After all, even the “super dinghies” are small enough to
fit into the back of a van or lorry when deflated, so smuggling them is not
hard.
“There are efforts underway to stop them being brought into the European Union via Bulgaria [from Turkey], but it’s like putting your finger in a dyke – if you block off one route, another will appear,” he says. “When Border Force seize boats, they do examine them forensically, analysing where the rubber and component parts are from, but it’s pretty clear that there’s still an unending supply, and if the gangs can’t import them from outside the EU, they can try making their own.”
He is also sceptical about the level of co-operation from the French, pointing out that the modern drone-spy technology deployed on the coast around Calais should allow any large dinghies to be stopped well before they put to sea. “These drones can practically tell what kind of sandwich someone is eating,” he says. “Why the French aren’t stopping them I don’t know – it seems they’re just giving it a Gallic shrug.”
Other observers, though, say the Government’s
efforts are making some difference. Tuesday Reitano is an expert on
human-smuggling at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime,
a respected research body that deploys investigators around the French coast
and in Germany (another transportation hub for Chinese boats).
“One of our researchers started seeing these bigger
boats a couple of months ago, but they’re not widespread and it’s hard to say
yet if it’s becoming a trend,” she says.
“The people smuggling used to be dominated by five
big organised groups, but there’s now rather more fragmentation due to law
enforcement from both the UK and France, leading to smaller actors stepping in.
It may be that some of them are trying to cheat the system and shove extra
people onto their boats, and it may be something of a ‘last push’ before the
winter weather makes crossings more difficult.”
She adds, however, that with the fragmentation has
come more violence, with gangs increasingly using weapons and even engaged in
firefights. That could reflect increasing desperation. Equally, it might simply
underline the commonality between the people-smugglers and the drug gangs.
“The analogy with drug trafficking is a good one,”
says Smith, who insists the Rwanda strategy, however contentious, would reduce
demand long-term. “As long as there are large numbers of people willing to pay
to come here, the smuggling will carry on, no matter how much law enforcement
you have. The only real way to stop it is to break the business model.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/d7411dddd11ccaf
Wednesday, October 1, 2025
Tuesday, September 30, 2025
Monday, September 29, 2025
Sunday, September 28, 2025
Labour has turned our constables into commissars
The Prime Minister cannot distance himself from
speech policing; this Government has encouraged these shocking arrests
The stirring up
racial hatred offence, first created in the Race Relations Act 1965, is very,
very serious. It carries a potential penalty of up to seven years in prison. It
is also disturbingly vague: What does “stirring up” actually mean? Who gets to
define “hatred”? Unlike American speech laws around incitement to violence,
speech doesn’t have to be “likely” to stir up violence to count as criminal,
but merely “intended” – meaning it strays into policing thought crime.
To safeguard free speech, any such charge requires the consent of the Attorney
General to proceed.
Once, it was used sparingly and for relatively
extreme cases. Among the first convictions, in 1967, was the leader of the
British National Socialist Movement, Colin Jordan.
But as our justice
system gets more politicised and the state grows more censorious, arrests and
prosecutions under this once-rare offence have expanded massively. Just one
person was convicted of the offence in 2015, compared with 44 last year.
Last year, Essex
Police used this offence to go after The Telegraph’s
Allison Pearson over a tweet in which she criticised two-tier policing, before
the force shamefacedly dropped the charges after a major public outcry. And as
even the White House now knows, childminder Lucy Connolly received a 31-month
prison sentence for stirring up racial hatred over a single, hastily deleted
tweet on the night of the Southport massacre.
Then there was
personal trainer Jamie Michael, who stood accused of stirring
up racial hatred over a Facebook monologue in which he urged people in his area
to protest peacefully against illegal migration. The case was against him was
in fact paper thin: in February, a jury found the former Royal Marine not
guilty in just 17 minutes.
The latest example
highlights just how bad things have got. Pete North, an online political
commentator and veteran of the Brexit movement was arrested for stirring up
racial hatred in his home late last night over a meme, before being driven 30 minutes to
Harrogate Police Station, where he was interrogated in the dead of night over
his alleged motivations.
Reportedly, the post in question was a picture of a
Palestine flag which read: “F--- Hamas, F--- Palestine, F--- Islam. Want to
protest? F--- off to a Muslim country and protest.” These are strong sentiments,
which many may find distasteful, but in a free country people should be able to
voice robust opinions without the police knocking on the door.
Mr North has said
that he had “not intended to stir up racial hatred”, adding: “I am entitled to
dislike a religion.” He isn’t wrong: the law is not supposed treat Islam, a
religion, as equivalent to a race, though increasingly the boundary between the
two is being blurred, not least through Labour’s efforts to conflate the two in its
“Islamophobia” rules.
Lord Young, director of the Free Speech Union,
said: “The police and the Crown Prosecution Service are defining this offence
incredibly broadly to justify arresting and, in some cases, prosecuting people
for social media posts. Muslims are not a race, yet Pete North is being
investigated for intending to stir up racial hatred, and asylum seekers aren’t
a race either, but Lucy Connolly was charged with the same offence.”
If police and prosecutors are interpreting this
offence more broadly than ever under, that’s because this Labour Government has
repeatedly encouraged them to do so.
Labour had been in
power less than a month before it effected a punitive crackdown on online speech
during the Southport unrest. Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, advised Sir Keir Starmer that it would be
lawful to charge social media users with stirring up racial hatred online.
Indeed, Hermer consented to 17 separate charges of this offence related to
Southport, later crowing that people could not “hide behind a keyboard”
following convictions. Sir Keir, meanwhile, has publicly backed the prosecution of the
most high-profile of these, Lucy Connolly.
The Prime Minister may wave away free speech
concerns when Donald Trump is in town, but shocking arrests like these are his
responsibility. After comedy writer Graham Linehan had his collar felt earlier
this month, Starmer tried to distance himself from such speech policing,
saying: “We must ensure the police focus on the most serious issues.” Yet the
fact is, the message Labour has been sending in Government is quite the
opposite. The public are right to draw a link between arrests over speech and
“two-tier Keir”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/1c04c52b10a4ff8c
Saturday, September 27, 2025
Friday, September 26, 2025
Thursday, September 25, 2025
Wednesday, September 24, 2025
Tuesday, September 23, 2025
Monday, September 22, 2025
Sunday, September 21, 2025
Saturday, September 20, 2025
Gender-critical
gay rights groups unite against trans lobby
Newly formed LGB
International says gay people are at risk of losing hard-won rights
Gender-critical gay rights groups are forming a
global alliance to challenge transgender advocates.
On Saturday, the LGB Alliance relaunched as LGB
International to declare its “independence from the LGBTQIA+ establishment” and
to distance itself from the “legacy gay organisations which now focus entirely
on transgender issues”.
The LGB Alliance
was started in 2019 following a fallout and factionalism at Stonewall, Europe’s
biggest LGBT rights organisation, after it was accused of promoting a “trans agenda” at
the expense of gay and lesbian rights.
At the time, the LGB Alliance, which is made up of gender-critical lesbian, gay and bisexuals, said the point of forming a new organisation was to “counteract the confusion between sex and gender which is now widespread in the public sector and elsewhere”.
Speaking of the group’s relaunch, Frederick
Schminke, the chairman of LGB International, which does not include transgender
organisations, said: “We are launching this because the organisations that once
represented gay people are now entirely devoted to ‘gender identity ideology’.
“We risk losing our hard-won rights, and as public support
plummets, traditional LGBTQ+ organisations have barricaded themselves up
against all reason, fostering an atmosphere where no dissenting views are
tolerated.”
The launch of the new global organisation comes
amid mounting friction between some LGB groups and the International Lesbian,
Gay, Bisexal, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), which has been
increasingly vocal in its support of trans issues in recent years.
Mr Schminke added that ILGA “no longer speaks for
us”.
LGB International said it had member organisations
in 18 countries, including Australia, Bulgaria, Taiwan and the US, and that the
groups were inspired by the creation of LGB Alliance six years ago.
The group said it wanted to raise awareness of the
64 countries where homosexuality was still illegal, places where same-sex
partnerships were not recognised in law and cases in which it believed that
“gender identity ideology is undermining same-sex rights”.
It also wants “to fight the way that heterosexual
men are defining themselves as lesbians and heterosexual women as gay men and
demanding access to our spaces and bodies”.
‘Peddling victimhood’
Bev Jackson, the co-founder of LGB Alliance, added:
“Gay men, lesbians and bisexuals are sick of seeing our movement, their language,
and their rights stripped away. Organisations like ILGA that once championed
LGB people now peddle victimhood. Meanwhile, LGB has been replaced by
meaningless jumbles of letters like “SOGIESC” [sexual orientation, gender
identity, gender expression, and sex characteristics].”
Responding to the launch of the new organisation, a
spokesman for the Beaumont Society, the largest and longest-established
transgender support group in the UK, said: “The emergence of yet more LGB
isolationist and similar ‘sex-based’ advocacy groups such as this, represent
the continuing efforts of well-funded groups with their own agenda to divide
the LGBTQIA+ family, and this is now spreading beyond the USA and UK.
“This is a retrogressive step as it ignores the
fact that all sections of the family intersect each other and that the history
of
the fight for rights for all sections depended on the actions of all working in
harmony.”
The row comes after
the UK Supreme Court ruled in April 2025 that
the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex, rather than gender
identity. The ruling has far-reaching implications for single-sex spaces and
services.
Last week, the equalities watchdog submitted its formal guidance about how institutions should respond to the landmark ruling.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has
handed the guidance to Bridget Phillipson, who, as well as being Education
Secretary, is also minister for women and equalities, and she must decide
whether to accept the recommendations of the watchdog.
Its interim advice,
released in April, included guidance which said that trans women should not be
permitted to use women’s facilities, and that schools must provide single-sex toilets for boys
and girls over the age of eight.
The row also comes amid a number of high-profile cases in which lesbian and gay people with gender-critical beliefs have faced backlash for their views.
In March it was
reported that police were forced to apologise over an investigation they
mounted into a Newcastle United fan banned by the football club after
expressing her gender-critical views on social media.
Northumbria Police told Linzi Smith that crucial elements of their investigation into claims she had committed a hate crime were not acceptable.
Ms Smith, who is gay and promotes lesbian, bisexual
and women’s rights, was accused of being transphobic by a complainant who told
the football club that trans people would not feel safe sitting near her.
In May it emerged
that a gay volunteer was banned from a railway group after
expressing his gender-critical views on email and social media.
Matthew Toomer, 48, was thrown out of West Midlands Railway’s (WMR) adopt a station scheme after he privately contacted company bosses to express concern about its “Progress Pride” train.
In response, he was summoned to a meeting and told
that his views “do not align with [WMR’s] values and mission”. He was banned
from the Redditch station volunteer group.
He spoke out, saying: “The Progress Pride flag has
become associated with particular ideological stances – particularly around
gender – which not everyone, including many within the LGB community, fully
endorse.”
In response to the LGB International launch, a
spokesperson for ILGA-Europe said: “ILGA is a global family of thousands of
independent organisations – more than 700 in our region alone – working
together to advance the rights of all LGBTI people.
“Our movement is built on a simple truth: the freedoms
we share, such as the rights to private and family life, bodily autonomy,
freedom from discrimination, and self-determination, are strongest when we
defend them collectively. None of us will be free until all of us are free.
“As an organisation working for almost 30 years to
advance, protect and defend human rights, ensuring everyone’s rights –
including those of women, migrants, racialised groups, and others – are upheld
has always been strong and a fundamental principle.
“Building coalitions that reflect the diversity of
our communities are the cornerstones of real progression. Division only weakens
the advancements we have already made, while collaboration across groups with
different needs is the path to lasting change for all, not just for some.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/9c8b2057c4a6d15a
Friday, September 19, 2025
Thursday, September 18, 2025
Wednesday, September 17, 2025
Detour
I took a long time getting here,
much of it wasted on wrong turns,
back roads riddled by ruts.
I had adventures
I never would have known
if I proceeded as the crow flies.
Super highways are so sure
of where they are going:
they arrive too soon.
A straight line isn’t always
the shortest distance
between two people.
Sometimes I act as though
I’m heading somewhere else
while, imperceptibly,
I narrow the gap between you and me.
I’m not sure I’ll ever
know the right way, but I don’t mind
getting lost now and then.
Maps don’t know everything.
Ruth Feldman
(The Ambitions of Ghosts)