No wonder migrants pay so much to clamber into a dinghy...

NO wonder migrants pay so much to clamber into a dinghy to Britain — it’s truly the golden ticket. Yes, they’re risking their lives in the Channel. But once here, it’s for good. Only three per cent of illegals arriving by small boat since 2018 have been deported. Just 4,995 out of 147,849.

Image Credit: The Sun [Migrants in a small inflatable boat attempting to cross the English Channel.]

The rest are still in the system or given the nod already to start new lives here, to which they should not be entitled and for which they brazenly jumped the queue. Not only do we no longer have a deterrent (Labour scrapped that). The Home Office’s total failure to boot out illegals is a magnet. Our global reputation is the softest of soft touches.

Remember Labour promising to end all this by “smashing the gangs”?. Instead, asylum claimants hit a new record of 108,138 last year, more than a third arriving by small boat. Remember Keir Starmer, aghast at the cost, vowing to stop putting them up in hotels? Instead, 8,494 MORE are in hotels than under the Tories.

The Government will argue it’s early days. But do even they still believe they have the answers?. ACCUSATIONS of “two-tier” justice under Labour are denounced as “far-right propaganda”. Then a disgraced Labour MP is let off his deserved jail stretch for thuggery.

Incite violence online, as nitwitted louts did over the Southport horror, and you’ll be banged up for years. Commit actual violence like drunken MP Mike Amesbury — decking a voter, then battering him on the ground — and you get ten weeks, suspended on appeal.

Incredibly, his lawyer actually tried to deploy two-tier justice, telling the judge that Amesbury faced a “second sentence . . . emotionally, professionally and mentally” — one presumably unique to politicians, particularly on the left. The judge bridled at that, but suspended Amesbury’s porridge anyway.

We trust Runcorn’s voters will now boot this yob MP out, as Labour has. But such leniency exposes a justice system provably haphazard and, to many, reeking of political and class bias too. FOR those who DO get locked up, tougher times are looming. Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood fancies a Texan scheme which could see her scrap early release altogether unless lags EARN it.

Not just by good behaviour, but by willing participation in mandatory new work schemes. The results in Texas look spectacular. Inmates’ behaviour has markedly improved. More prisoners win early freedom — but with a new sense of purpose, meaning far fewer reoffend.