How the Royal Navy Can't Stop the Channel Boats

Published: 28 October 2025. The English Chronicle Desk. The English Chronicle Online.

There are a few plain facts to set down before debating small boats crossing the Channel. Personally, I believe Britain has taken in far too many immigrants over recent decades. Our ability to assimilate, integrate and support these arrivals is under strain. Housing, welfare and public services are stretched; social cohesion is fraying; and violent or hateful incidents have become a distressing part of the national conversation. For these reasons, I argue that immigration must be sharply reduced and kept lower for an extended period. This is not an act of softness on my part — it is a call for realism about national capacity.

Yet it is important to separate different streams of migration. The vast majority of people entering the UK each year do so legally, under visas the Government grants. If the objective is to cut immigration substantially, the simplest instrument is also the most obvious: issue fewer visas. Doing so would hit numerous sectors that have come to rely on labour from abroad, and it would provoke fierce opposition in parts of higher education that make money from foreign students. It would make some services, such as elder care, more expensive in the short term. But tough choices are necessary: a reduced number of work and student visas — carefully targeted to protect high-value or security-sensitive categories, and to keep essential roles filled — is the single most effective lever to shrink overall immigration.

A related group are those who arrive on short-term visas and then claim asylum. Last year, roughly 100,000 people made asylum claims, many having already been in the country on visitor or short-term permits. The answer is the same in principle: fewer visas for higher-risk countries and tighter controls on initial entry would reduce the pool of people who can later claim asylum. In other words, stopping the boats is far down the list of things that matter if our aim is to drastically reduce immigration; a political choice to restrict visas would have far greater immediate impact.

All this said, the rubber dinghies that cross the Channel remain a pressing and emotive topic. Some commentators call for the Royal Navy to be “sent in” to stop crossings. My eleven years in the Royal Navy — much of it spent as a diver and aboard small, overloaded inflatables in all weathers — convinces me that this is both impractical and morally fraught. I have handled ships close to such boats and driven similar craft; I know the realities at sea better than most armchair critics.

A typical migrant dinghy is dangerously overloaded. Passengers often sit with legs over the side to create space; the boat sits so low in the water that any contact or misjudged manoeuvre risks swamping it. If a warship or another vessel attempted to “push” or shunt such a boat back toward French waters, the results would be catastrophic: broken limbs, a swamped craft, people thrown into cold water where many will quickly suffer cold shock and drown, life jackets notwithstanding. In practice, the right response upon encountering people in such peril is rescue — as the Border Force and RNLI do. A disabled migrant dinghy is already a rescue situation; were you to see a similar scene in any other maritime disaster, you would expect rescue rather than deliberate harm.

There is also a legal and moral imperative to act. Once rescued onto a British-flagged vessel, those people are effectively on British territory and have the right to apply for asylum. The presence of rescue craft thus acts, in effect, as a lifeline and a transport service that brings people to the UK’s asylum system. Sending more British vessels into the Channel — whether warships or additional patrol boats — would therefore likely increase the number of migrants landed safely on our shores, not reduce crossings. Worse, deploying high-value naval assets away from their core duties — deterring hostile actors, maintaining maritime security and contributing to NATO operations — would be a poor trade-off.

Some have advocated abandoning the duty to rescue and letting people perish as a deterrent. That proposal is both morally repugnant and illegal. My grandfather, a merchant navy officer who fought through World War II, had a single unbreakable rule: always stop to pick up people in the water, irrespective of nationality. That principle — stamped into maritime tradition and embodied in international law — forbids leaving those in peril to drown. Any order for Royal Navy vessels to refuse rescue or to harm civilians would be unlawful; seafarers and naval professionals would not obey such commands. The suggestion that the Royal Navy should commit mass murder because civilian institutions are failing is obscene.

If the goal is to deter smuggling and turn the tide of crossings, there are alternatives that do not contravene maritime obligations. Look to the Mediterranean, where NGOs operate rescue ships that then land migrants in Europe, thereby incentivising crossings. The Channel could have a different model: commercially run, foreign-flagged rescue vessels based in North Africa. These ships would pick up people in distress but, crucially, deliver them to the port of their flag state or to a nearby country willing to receive them, rather than to the UK. Under maritime law, a rescuer is obliged to disembark survivors at a “place of safety,” but nothing requires that place to be Britain. If a vessel flies, for example, the Liberian flag and has a prearranged base in an African port, rescued migrants would have recourse only in that jurisdiction.

A pragmatic scheme could see Britain pay commercial operators to station rescue vessels in suitable bases, for a fraction of the long-term cost of hotel-based asylum accommodation. The economic incentive would attract private firms to perform rescue services to specified ports outside UK jurisdiction; migrants would be disembarked elsewhere and the smugglers’ business model would be undermined. Alternatively, charities could be established to fund and run such operations; they would save lives while removing the direct incentive that current UK rescues provide to cross the Channel.

Of course, such proposals require international cooperation and politically fraught negotiations with third countries. There are also humanitarian risks if rescued people are taken to states unwilling to guarantee adequate conditions. But the logic remains: saving lives at sea need not translate automatically into asylum access in Britain. With the right legal frameworks and contractual arrangements, rescue can be life-preserving and simultaneously non-incentivising.

In short, sending the Royal Navy into the Channel to stop dinghies will not work — it would either increase arrivals, violate deeply held legal and moral obligations, or both. The real levers are immigration policy and international operational design: restrict risky visas, cut off routes of legal arrival that are later abused, and create an architecture of rescue that disembarks survivors where they can be processed outside UK jurisdiction. If the Government will not act, citizens of goodwill might still support pragmatic, legal measures that save lives without incentivising smugglers. We should be realistic, humane and strategically smart — and above all refuse to accept that the defence of our shores requires abandoning the duty to save life at sea.