WHAT would happen if we stopped thinking about the arrival of thousands of people in small boats as a “crisis” and started thinking about it as an opportunity — something that Britain could be proud of? This is the premise of Horatio Clare’s new book, We Came By Sea: both that there are positive aspects to the arrival of migrants, and that the “problem”, such as it is, is a solvable one.
A former BBC producer and a radio presenter, Mr Clare is a writer known for his memoir, travel, and nature books, and his writing on mental health. Yet he has been interested in the plight of asylum-seekers ever since a journalistic assignment took him to Throckmorton, in Worcestershire, at the beginning of the 2000s.
The abandoned defence site had been used as a burial ground for cattle in the foot-and-mouth crisis, and there were plans — dropped, after vocal opposition — to turn it into a detention centre for refugees. “I had a look around, and I asked some questions, and it appeared that there was no policy whatsoever,” he says now.
The story stayed with him, and later emerged in this more recent writing project. “I wanted to write a travel book about Britain, but I wanted to try and see Britain as if it was a foreign country, through foreign eyes, and the way I chose to look at it was through the small-boats crisis,” he says.
More than 150,000 people have crossed the English Channel in small boats since the crossings began in earnest in 2018, after the Brexit vote, and a record 20,000 this year alone. It is a highly emotive issue — and very much in the news, after President Macron’s visit to the UK last week. Behind the crossings, there lies a ruthless criminal enterprise. Managing the arrivals is hugely costly: in May, the BBC reported that accommodation for asylum-seekers would cost the taxpayer £15.3 billion over a ten-year period, and this is public money, paid to private companies.
Mr Clare wanted to find out more about the reality on the ground. He spent time on both sides of the Channel, talking to would-be refugees, volunteers for charities supporting them, and some of those charged with enforcing government policy.
He met people who had travelled from all over the world — including Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen — who, despite being held in appalling conditions, seem to remain remarkably hopeful. He met aid workers, such as “the inspirational” Clare Moseley, who founded Care4Calais, a charity that has pursued French and British authorities over their action or inaction when migrants drown at sea, taken the Government to court over the conditions in which asylum-seekers are held, and prevented deportation flights to Rwanda.
At the same time, he heard stories about some of the efforts made to keep the boats from landing: “pushbacks”, in which jet-ski teams are sent out to ram overloaded inflatables, knowing full well that some of the passengers can’t swim. He was told how the former immigration minister Robert Jenrick visited a reception centre for unaccompanied children and ordered Disney characters on the walls to be painted over because they were “too welcoming”. Mr Clare looked into the Bibby Stockholm barge and the Rwanda policy (“I think it was desperation and really malign precedent,” he says).
The Bibby Stockholm was established in 2023 to house asylum-seekers, until Leonard Farruku, a 27-year-old Albanian, took his own life after telling his sister that he was “being treated like an animal”. The Home Office refused to pay for the repatriation of his body. Mr Farruku’s family set up a GoFundMe page. One donor — who gave £5 — wrote: “Please know, that most decent British people would never want or allow this.” And that, argues Mr Clare, is the truth at the grass roots. He believes that the British are compassionate and generous — and that this is one reason that migrants want to come here.
MR CLARE has been speaking about his book alongside another journalist, Nicola Kelly, whose book Anywhere But Here: How Britain’s broken asylum system fails us all came out in April. “Nicola has had death threats; so, when we go to do events together, we get security,” he says.
Ms Moseley (who has stepped down from the charity that she founded) has received similar treatment. “She is an astounding person. I think Clare should have a statue in Trafalgar Square. Instead, she has been demonised, and continues to be demonised by everyone from Prime Ministers down to the far-Right, who threaten her personal safety,” he says.
Why does he think that small-boat crossings have become such a toxic issue? “I think it’s journalism running amok, to be honest with you. It’s so effective at generating reptile-brain hatred, fear, loathing, anger, outrage, indignation from all sides, that it just never fails to sell papers,” he says.
AlamyAbout 250 people attended a rally in Dover in April, protesting against illegal migration
He has been told by people in the Home Office that policy-makers live in fear of the right-wing media. “Instead of coming up with policies, they spend their time asking, ‘How would this play in the Daily Mail?’ It’s not the Mail’s job to make policy. They are here to follow and to report, not to lead,” he says.
He is also highly critical of GB News. Presenters sit under a Union flag, “but they don’t represent our values, and they set about to poison this story quite mindfully”, he says. “Free speech does not mean misinforming people. That’s just wrong. . . This issue has turned half of us into Putin’s bots, and it’s completely against everything we stand for.”
And he has no time for Nigel Farage. “I think he is the enemy of British values, honestly; I’d put it as strongly as that. His line on the RNLI being ‘a taxi service for migrants’ was deliberately intended to embolden the far-Right. Nobody who does that is fit to be a British politician, never mind a Prime Minister.”
THE migrants he met in his research for the book are “exactly the people we want in Britain”, he insists. “There are ICT graduates and human-rights lawyers, and people who would pick fruit, and people who would work in care homes and are desperate to do so. They’re the best people in the world. They’re often very resilient. They’re very idealistic, and they’re often the people to be chosen by their communities — ambassadors, as much as breadwinners. We’d be so lucky to have them.”
He is not arguing for all of them to be allowed to stay. “Twenty or 30 per cent of [those who come] do not have a claim, according to the rules, and I have to be in favour of returning those people who don’t have a valid claim. But 60 to 80 per cent of them do. And that’s the future of this country.”
One of the points that he makes in the book is that the Government, swiftly and compassionately, came up with the Homes for Ukraine scheme. Why such a different approach?
“I asked Clare Mosley the same question, and she said, ‘It’s the media.’ And it’s also because they’re white, they’re European, they’re Christian.”
The reason that the scheme worked, he says, is because the British Government gave local government the money to support the Ukrainians. “That changed everything. There was no outsourcing. If we did that that with these asylum-seekers nowadays, we wouldn’t have the backlog, because people like my mum would have four or five of them in her house. The whole country is covered in pensioners who would love to take in an Afghan or Yemeni, but they need the funding.”
At the moment, the money spent on housing refugees having their claims assessed is paid to private companies. The National Audit Office found that, by the end of March 2024, the Home Office had spent at least £230 million developing four large sites — the Bibby Stockholm, the former RAF bases at Scampton and Wethersfield, and former student accommodation in Huddersfield — for asylum-seekers. Mr Clare argues that giving this to local governments instead would be transformational.
“This is the key to the whole thing. If you give [that money] to places like Rotherham, they improve their housing stock, social care, schools, hospitals, first, and get their veterans off the street. And then you can say, when you see an asylum-seeker walking past your window, you know that that person represents money coming into your community.”
Is he optimistic that things will change? “It depends if you think that progressive causes and courageous politicians within the Labour Party will win over the reactionary voices that frighten people. The thing that worries me is that people like [the Home Secretary] Yvette Cooper have been so long subjected to the Daily Mail kind of politics, that she’s struggling to see beyond it.”
He sees glimmers of hope, after the recent UK-France migrant deal. “It’s a step in the right direction, but I doubt it will get as far as working at scale,” he says. “The real story is the reopening of a safe and legal route. That’s crucial. And ‘Smash the gangs’? I don’t think it will work. I don’t think anyone thinks it can work without it being ludicrously cruel or expensive.
“And they’re talking about building a very big asylum camp, and that is not the solution. All you’re doing there is nationalising a cost instead of nationalising a benefit.”
Mr Clare is determined to hold on to his optimism. “I refuse to believe that we are going to be beaten on this. I think, as a country, we will come round to see this very differently.”
AlamyMigrants on a small boat leaving Sangatte in France for the UK last month
Other countries look to Britain for leadership, he says. “We really shouldn’t underestimate our potential to do good. But that involves a romantic conception of Britain, which is very similar to the views of Churchill and Attlee . . . which is that there are values here worth fighting for, and they tend to be anti-fascist values.”
What the UK needs to do, he argues, is to create safe and legal routes. “I think if people arrive to a country that isn’t freaked out by them, and recognises their value, they will behave in different ways; and, if they can work straight away, people will pay taxes. We actually need them. What we don’t need to do is put them in internment camps. It’s such a waste of potential. I don’t think it’s a difficult fix. I think it just needs some political vision.”
What would he like his book to achieve? He has a list: “Change the entire way we see the small-boat crossings; change our relationship to refugees; destroy Nigel Farage’s career as a British politician; and end GB News. Those are the things I’m working on, and I’ll continue to work on them for as long as I have breath in my body.”
Reactions to his book have been two-fold, he says. “The GB News constituency is completely predictable. The other side has come from religious organisations. The response is amazing. And I suddenly realised — my wife’s a vicar’s daughter — of course the Church has always looked after the refugee, and I do think that is a wonderful thing.
“In Pope Francis’s words, every migrant has a name and a home. I think that tells we need to know. It’s God versus GB News.”
We Came By Sea by Horatio Clare is published by Little Toller Books at £20 (Church Times Bookshop £18); 978-1-915068-45-3.
From We Came By Sea
THE artist comes down to the liquid black one night. He has been waiting for the call for weeks and it has come, and now the tide is far out and he is with a large group, including several women and children. The boat is pumped up in the dunes around midnight. A dozen men lift it on to their shoulders and carry it down to the beach. Out, the smuggler says, take it out, and he wades along with them, fixing the engine to the back. He tells the artist to bring the petrol tank, and the artist struggles into the water with it clutched across his chest, thick plastic, reeking of fuel. The tank is heavy but he wishes it were heavier. Is there enough inside? He wishes he knew about engines, about fuel. One of the men brings a stack of plastic bowls that the smuggler has handed him, and as soon as the boat is floating lumpily in the waves, the water starts to come in over the fat tube and the smuggler shouts at them: Get in, use the bowls, get the water out.
He does not have to say, Pray the British pick you up. Pray for the British, pray the British will come.
How much fuel do we have? the artist shouts. You have enough fuel to go all the way, the smuggler says, and then they are into the boat and the engine is running and they are going into the liquid black. They are cold and soaked through from the wading and they are all praying.
The artist stares at the blackness, at the lights of ships, at the fear. Calm, calm he tells himself, calm, they all tell themselves, do not admit the fear, do not admit the hope, do not admit the possibilities of anything but — so far so good, so far so good, so far. They keep coming. The helmsman is barely out of his teens but he keeps the tiller and the throttle steady. He may be a steady soul or he may be frozen with fear, but either way he keeps them bearing into the black. They pray they do not break down and drown. They pray the tube does not deflate. They pray the engine does not stop in French waters, or all this will be for nothing.
Prayers are not much against the size of the sea. But the engine does not stop. They do not know anything about the currents or the tide, the tide which was so far out when they launched and is starting to turn, starting to haul an inconceivable weight of Atlantic seawater from the south-west towards the north-east, up-Channel, slowing them only a little at first, and pushing them off course to the north. The boy keeps them bearing on. One hour, two. It will not be morning soon. Ships and lights in the darkness, and Britain ahead. They can see them clearly now, the lights of the tall transiting towers on the cliffs of Britain ahead. They all shiver, packed together. Parents give the children water. The artist watches the sea, willing it to stay calm, praying it will stay calm, the weather forecast is good, the sea is supposed to stay calm, but far out here it heaves and rolls like a beast in half-sleep.
The artist does not know it, but if he falls into the sea, after hours cramped on a boat like this, his legs will not work. The RNLI have seen it often: a few seconds in the Dover Strait’s typical temperature of seven degrees or so will wind him, hammer his heart, and gasp his breath. He will hang helpless in his life jacket, which may or may not work properly. He will not have the strength to haul himself into a rescue boat, should one appear. Just a few moments in this sea will render him utterly helpless.
There is a shower of rain, and the wind is stronger, but the prayers are working. The tube is not going down, the engine is running, and what water comes into the boat — every slapsplosh of it a terror — they bail out with the bowls. Six hours and a grey paling behind them, over France. The day, the light, will come. And, though they do not know it yet, the British will come. Dover lifeboat will come.
