a political issue of a kind for some time viewers will remember that in NUMBER_TOKEN the then home secretary sanji javid cut short his holiday to go and stare at the english channel and say that he was getting a grip on this issue this issue however hasn't gone away however much politicians stare at water and we've seen a very significant increase in the number of people coming illegally in recent months and it's important to get the figures in some perspective um the number of migrants arriving was four times higher last year than it was the year before that it was it was almost NUMBER_TOKEN people in NUMBER_TOKEN and it was eight and a half thousand in NUMBER_TOKEN now the number for NUMBER_TOKEN having quadrupled last year the number for NUMBER_TOKEN is already double that of last year we've already seen in the first six months of this year more than NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN migrants arriving illegally by boat across the english channel and we've also seen the daily records for that exceeded with a high in july of NUMBER_TOKEN people making the journey in just one day so this has become an issue which uh which politicians continues to pretend that they're going to address and continue to not address and as i say in the piece if they don't then the numbers will simply grow and grow because the pool of people who wish to come to the uk and who might be attracted by this idea of a parallel asylum system where on the one hand there's the legal system on the other hand there's the first across the channel in in a dinghy competition the number of people willing to do that is vast across many continents in the globe and so i suggest it's a massive issue that the the government needs to get a grip on if it doesn't it'll grow and grow and become worse for the government envir do you think it's an issue that more people are trying and succeeding in terms of crossing the channel well it's important to put this in context there are far fewer people coming to this country seeking asylum than they were a decade ago we we had a huge far higher number over a hundred thousand at one point when tony blair was prime minister last year the numbers were down to around about NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN and if you look at the the trend over the last five years and as i say the last decade it's a downward trend nevertheless the numbers as douglas rightly says coming across the channel have increased and that of course poses a chat poses a big challenge for our government and it would do for any government of any color because when you have people coming across one of the world's busiest shipping lanes in very small boats risking their lives that that is a huge issue and it has to be addressed but the context is really important here the overall context is that the numbers coming to this country seeking asylum over the last few years and over the last decade has been declining and it's important to to recognize that several several things about that one is of course it's not surprising that the asylum plays were down last year because most of the world was in lockdown um and it's it's it's very hard to draw the trajectory of the last decade not least also because of the movement you're talking about of course uh in the in the previous decade under labour was significantly to do with intra-eu migration uh it was to do with the british government losing control of the british britain's borders uh
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