4 days Ago By Bethany Whittingham
Keir Starmer was skewered in a gruelling GB News rant as migrant crossings hit a record high for this year in a damning development for the Prime Minister’s ‘Smash the Gangs’ plan. On Tuesday (April 15), a record number of small boat migrants crossed the English Channel just days after the largest number this year made the illegal journey. Provisional figures show around 700 migrants arrive in UK waters yesterday, surpassing the previous one-day record of 656 migrant arrivals.
The latest crossings take the number of small boat migrants who have travelled to the UK this year to almost 9,000. These figures are around 40 per cent higher than the 6,265 who crossed the Channel at this time last year. It makes for grim reading for the Labour leader, who promised the government would “smash the gangs” this year.
On Wednesday (April 16), presenters Eamonn Holmes and Miriam Cates welcomed political commentator James Schneider onto the show to get his thoughts the latest figures. At first, the broadcaster hit out at former Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak over his 'Stop the Boats' campaign. He began: "This is the problem with trying to manage a serious issue through a three-word slogan.
" Rishi Sunak tried to do it to create a big dividing line with the ‘Stop the boats’, and the thing is, you can only stop the boats if you do things that people don’t want to do. So, you could stop the boats if you were drowning more people in the [English] Channel but that would offend us very much." He then took aim at Keir Starmer for his 'Smash the Gangs' campaign.
He fumed: " Keir Starmer has to have his equivalent, so it’s ‘Smash the Gangs'. But that suggests that the only reason why people are coming is because they are essentially being people trafficked which is not the case. "My point is, if you want to deal with the issue of people crossing and how we deal with refugees and how we decide who’s a refugee and who isn’t, saying we’re just going after the gangs, that doesn’t solve the issue either.
"So if you did want to reduce the number of people who should gain support in our country, who should be gaining refugee status from taking this dangerous journey, then there needs to be ways in which asylum cases and refugee claims can be processed outside of Britain". This is a breaking live TV story, the Showbiz Express.co.
uk team will be updating this story with the latest information as soon as we receive it. For further updates, please refresh the page You can also get email updates on the day’s biggest TV stories straight to your inbox by _signing up for our TV newsletter. Get all the very best news, pictures, opinion and video on your favourite TV shows by following Express.
co.uk every time you see our name. Follow Express on Google News - CLICK HERE Follow Express on Apple News - _ CLICK HERE_ _ available on Apple devices_ Follow Express on _Flipboard - _ CLICK HERE and click follow You can also sign up for Twitter alerts for breaking news and all the latest updates by following @Daily_Express , or for the latest TV and showbiz news, follow @expressceleb Keep up-to-date with your must-see TV stories, features, videos and pictures throughout the day by following us on Facebook at Express Celebrity.
