Yvette Cooper Pays The Price For Huge Failures On Channel Crossings And Migrant Hotels

The Home Office has stumbled from one catastrophe to another during Yvette Cooper’s turbulent year in charge, and she is now paying the price for a litany of dismal failures.

Chief among them is Labour’s derisory ‘smash the gangs’ promise to tackle the small boats problem, which has proved ineffective. 

The resulting increase in immigration is one of the main causes of the Reform Party’s ascent, which is reshaping British politics.

Ms Cooper had promised the new Border Security Command would ‘pursue, disrupt, and arrest those responsible for the vile trade’ in people trafficking, which has seen drownings and misery plaguing the English Channel. 

But mainly what the public witnesses is images of border control and coastguard vessels helpfully yanking migrants out of small boats in the middle of the Channel and giving them a free ‘taxi ride’ to Britain, no papers needed.

The statistics speak for themselves. Since the election, the number of migrants to have reached Britain has passed 50,000, a record high, with the soaring figure a clear indication of the lack of a plan since Labour axed the Tories’ Rwanda deportation scheme on their first day in power.

As locals wait on housing waiting lists, large numbers of migrants are now coming and being forced to reside in council apartments or four-star hotels thanks to government funding. The Home Office acknowledges that health and education services are under pressure.

With protests and arrests straining police forces across the nation, Labour has seen a second summer of turmoil amid growing public unease.

The Home Office has frequently promised to cut down on the use of hotels for migrants, yet numerous hotels are still ‘closed’ to the public and full of migrants instead. 

The recent chaos at the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, is seen as a consequence of the Government’s failure to get a grip on the problem.

From shoplifting to grooming gangs to curbs on free speech, it would be easier to choose the worst catastrophe than to pick out any individual successes notched up by Ms Cooper’s department. 

As chair of the Home Affairs Committee and Shadow Home Secretary, she had thoroughly researched every aspect of the department and came to the Home Office with a reputation as a true expert in her portfolio.

But the challenges she encountered were dizzying, with one long-serving minister remarking to the BBC that ‘whichever cupboard you open, you know all sorts of terrible things that have been crammed in there for years will fall out’.

The trouble for Ms Cooper, to continue this metaphor, may be that she seems to have ripped open all the cupboard doors at the same time.

Her failure to set up a grooming gangs inquiry – or, as her critics would say, take the issue seriously at all – was one of the avoidable own goals.

Meanwhile, the shoplifting epidemic has grown worse than ever, with current shock figures showing nearly 800 crimes a day are going unsolved.

Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures published last month revealed that shoplifting struck a record high of 530,643 crimes reported to police in the year to March, a 20 per cent increase on the previous year’s count of 444,022.

Meanwhile, the Government’s Online Safety Act, though rightly striving to protect children from the plague of pornography, may be curtailing freedom of speech on the internet, according to experts.

One of the primary duties of a Home Secretary who presides over the police and MI5 is for the safety of the nation, yet even Yvette Cooper’s bid to act tough fell flat.

In early July, she determined that Palestinian Action was a terrorist group, after idiotic activists broke into RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire and sprayed red paint into the engines of two refuelling aircraft.

Amid a national debate over whether this wanton criminal act amounted to actual terrorism, Palestine Action exploited the publicity and lured support from other bloody-minded anti-social groups such as Just Stop Oil, and the newspapers were filled with images of unlikely-looking ‘terrorist’ activists on Palestine Action marches, including two 89-year-old ladies being taken away in police vans.

Ultimately, it is immigration that will serve as the millstone around Ms Cooper’s neck. Concern over immigration has surged to become the public’s most pressing issue, according to polling.

Almost half the public view immigration as one of the biggest issues in the country – the highest proportion since just before the historic Brexit vote – a recent survey by Ipsos found.

It was cited by 49 per cent of people invited to list the ‘most pressing issues facing Britain today’, up 15 percentage points on the previous month.

The exact number of undocumented migrants in the UK is unknown.

The Home Office fails to collect ‘basic information’ on foreign workers, including whether they carry on working illegally in the UK at the end of their visas, MPs from the Commons’ Public Accounts Committee (PAC) warned recently. They found the department ‘does not know’ how many foreign visa holders leave the country when they are supposed to.

The right to free expression has turned into a poisonous issue under Ms. Cooper’s leadership.

Humiliatingly, for a country that has long cherished a free Press, Britain has found itself being criticised by US Vice President JD Vance for cracking down on free speech.

It comes after absurd scenes when police officers take a break from chasing criminals to call on the houses of those who have been accused of posting abusive content on social media.

The head of the Metropolitan Police recently blamed politicians for putting his officers in an ‘impossible position’ over online speech.

After Father Ted creator Graham Linehan was arrested for remarks he made on social media, he spoke out.

In response to Mr. Linehan’s three posts on X in April, Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley justified the five armed police who detained him at Heathrow on Monday on suspicion of inciting violence.

The tweets included one in which he quipped that women should punch transgender women ‘in the balls’ if they use female-only spaces.

Sir Mark said ‘a threat to punch someone from a protected group could be an offence’ but admitted: ‘I understand the concern caused by such incidents given differing perspectives on the balance between free speech and the risks of inciting violence in the real world.’

He added: ‘When it comes to lesser cases, where there is ambiguity in terms of intent and harm, policing has been left between a rock and a hard place by successive governments who have given officers no choice but to record such incidents as crimes when they’re reported. Then they are obliged to follow all lines of inquiry and take action as appropriate.’

Ms Cooper, 56, a Labour veteran who served in Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s governments, and is married to former Labour minister Ed Balls, risks being remembered as the Home Secretary who failed to secure Britain’s borders.

Now, as Foreign Secretary, her job is to travel beyond them, and only time will tell if she can make more of a success at that.

The issue is that the massive failures on the Channel crossing are being borne by us, the British taxpayers.

How could she bear the consequences of bringing about mass migration? Or are Starmer and Labour only trying to mislead the people with this policy?

Removing all internal borders appears to be Yvette Cooper’s goal. She might as well turn it over to Fox’s so they can control it, and if she is being sacked because of her failure on small boats and migrant hotels, then Starmer should go as well.

This is the biggest crisis in the UK since the pandemic, and he has literally done nothing – he won’t even talk about it!

I wonder what their next job will be? Strictly Come Dancing perhaps!

But it’s par for the course with this government.

They have no idea how to govern the UK, and Starmer and his friends are destroying it. It’s shameful that they continue to embezzle money from hard-working taxpayers and give everything away for free to migrants who shouldn’t be here in the first place. This is just Shambolic leadership.

Starmer promised that Labour would ‘smash the smuggling gangs’, but the only people that Labour have ‘smashed’ are the British people.

At this point, Keir Starmer should just acknowledge that he is unfit for the position and call for a general election.

If someone runs a company and someone is hopeless at their job, they are fired – they’re not moved down the corridor to another division.

To be honest, they’re all useless – the same corpse in a different shroud!