Farage attacks Burnham over Channel crisis as PM vows to change tactics

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has accused Andy Burnham of not having the balls to stop the boats.

The broadside came as the Prime Minister admitted he needs to change tactics to put a stop to the crisis.

Emerging from his week-long holiday, he conceded people will be worried by Monday’s arrival of a mega-dinghy carrying 230 illegal migrants.

Mr Burnham told GB News: “It shows that the gangs are changing their tactics, but so will we.”

Less than a fortnight after insisting the Government’s plan was working, he added: “We will now change our tactics and we will be relentless in chasing them down.”

But, in a Sun interview, Reform chief Mr Farage said: “Burnham has no more guts to deal with this than we had with Rishi, than we had with Boris Johnson.

“They tell the public what they want to hear. None of them have got the balls to actually deal with this. And I tell you what, I have.”

Ministers are scrambling to respond to public concern over the small boats crisis, which has resulted in asylum seekers being housed among worried communities.

More than 3,000 people have arrived in the three weeks since Mr Burnham entered Downing Street.

The recent surge has also sparked fury that French police are failing to make enough interceptions for the £1billion of UK taxpayers’ cash handed to Paris in recent years.

Home Office figures published on Tuesday revealed France stopped less than a third of those attempting to cross last week.

They thwarted 472 migrants launching from the beaches but 1,176 slipped through their fingers.

Pictures of gendarmes standing gormlessly while migrants storm into the sea have triggered calls to withhold some of the funding being given to France.

But Mr Burnham defended the arrangements, saying: “The deal we put in place, the payment by results deal, has created a change.

“There is more law enforcement on the other side of the Channel in summer 2026 than there was last summer, and that has led to quite a reduction in the number of crossings. But that’s not good enough.

“People will say to me, ‘We don’t want any crossings’. I understand that concern.

“There are further things that we are doing, and we will keep going at this issue until we deliver that eradication that people are looking for.”

He is understood to have kept Sir Keir Starmer’s target of closing every migrant hotel by the nextgeneral election.

Speaking in Clacton, Essex, ahead of tomorrow’s by-election there, Mr Farage repeated his plan to tow the boats back to France.

Quizzed on potential resistance from Emmanuel Macron’s government, the Reform leader told The Sun: “Well, give us our billion quid back then.

“We’ve given them a billion quid to stop the boats. The French navy literally escorts the boats to the 12-mile line and hands them over to the British authorities.

“Under the international rule of the sea, if people are in peril, and frankly anyone on those insecure boats is in peril, we are perfectly entitled to take them back to the safest next place of land, and that’s France — the safe country that they’ve come from.”

Mr Farage, who held a copy of Tuesday’s Sun with a photo of the mega-dinghy on the front page, added: “We’ve got a Royal Navy, we’ve also got a fleet of Border Force vessels there, based in Ramsgate, dealing with these operations.

“And frankly, if the Royal Navy is not there to protect us from invasion what’s the point of having it?”

He also warned that the deathtrap dinghies would lead to more tragedies in the Channel if they are not halted.

Mr Farage said: “I want to stop the boats to secure our borders.

“I want to stop the boats in the interest of national security. I want to stop the boats in the interest of the safety of women and girls.

“But I also want to stop the boats to save lives, because people are dying, and those that come, many finish up working in criminal gangs, finish up, frankly, in the equivalent of modern-day slavery.

“We should be hanging our heads in shame over this.”

Meanwhile, Housing Secretary Angela Rayner has been accused of being in denial for saying the small boats are often packed with women and children.

She made the remark as she lashed out at smuggling gangs for piling desperate people into ramshackle dinghies.

Ms Rayner told the BBC: “We’re also saying that those criminal gangs that are putting often children and women into vessels that are not seaworthy, we’re seeing people that are dying at sea that are desperate to come here and we’ve got to crack that and stop it.”

Around three-quarters of small boat arrivals are men, according to Home Office figures.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said: “Angela Rayner is in denial. Illegal Channel crossings are dominated by young single males.

“Those women and children that cross are often being used as a human shield.

“Many of the mainly young, male illegal immigrants have gone on to commit crimes including rape and murder. Rayner is out of touch with reality and should be ashamed.”

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BOAT

THE 49ft mega-dinghy brought a record 230 migrants across the Channel on Monday — a stark reminder of how smuggling gangs are cramming more and more people on to “small boats” which are becoming bigger and bigger each year, as seen here:

Small boats started off as just that in 2018, with only three migrants seen aboard here

In 2022 the boats and number of migrants aboard them were noticeably bigger

By 2025 the dinghies had reached a staggering size, ferrying huge numbers across the Channel, surpassed only by the mega-dinghy we have now seen in 2026