How Labour and Tory Complicity Turned Asylum Into a £15bn Cash Cow

It’s fascinating to watch the new round of propaganda being circulated throughout social media on small boat crossings, as if the subject isn’t toxic enough already.

The latest offering is “Blame it on Brexit”, the reflexive cry of the ultraliberal commentariat whenever waves of Channel crossings dominate headlines. This comfortable myth allows politicians to avoid confronting the truth: the boats didn’t appear because of Brexit, and the Dublin Agreement wouldn’t have stopped them. What we are really witnessing is not simply a migration crisis, but a £15 billion racket, disguised as immigration crisis, with both Labour and the Tories complicit in the £15 billion scam.

The facts demolish the Brexit narrative completely. Between 2014 and 2019, over 53,000 people were caught entering the UK hidden in lorries and containers. Many more slipped through undetected, some dying horrifically in the process, like the 39 found suffocated in Essex in 2019.

The Dublin Agreement was in place throughout this period, yet people kept coming because poverty and desperation doesn’t respect bureaucratic procedures.

The Route Changed, Not the Reason

The boats began arriving in 2018, while Britain remained fully inside the EU and bound by Dublin rules. By 2019, crossings had surged 500%. Same desperation, same economic incentives, different method. As ports like Calais tightened security, smugglers adapted by turning to the sea. This represents tactical evolution, not Brexit consequence.

Even the vaunted Dublin mechanism proved worthless for actual deterrence. From 2008 to 2020, the UK returned an average of just 560 people annually under Dublin rules. Compare that to average net migration of 244,000 per year between 2015 and 2019. The Dublin Regulation accounted for barely a statistical blip, holding it up as the solution is either profound ignorance or deliberate deception.

The Corporate Profiteering Scandal

While politicians perform theatrical outrage about Channel crossings, private companies laugh all the way to the bank. Asylum accommodation contracts, initially expected to cost £4.5 billion in 2019, have exploded to an eye-watering £15.3 billion. This isn’t policy failure, it’s corporate success.

Three companies, Serco, Mears, and Clearsprings, have extracted nearly £400 million in profits from these deals since 2019. Clearsprings alone has seen its contract balloon from £700 million to £7 billion. The founder, Graham King, has donated to the Conservative Party, a convenient coincidence that ensures friendly contract terms. Hotel owners enjoy similar windfalls, receiving three-quarters of asylum accommodation money for warehousing people in conditions that would shame Victorian workhouse operators.

This represents the privatisation of human misery on an industrial scale. Public money flows directly into private pockets while asylum seekers endure bureaucratic limbo and communities face manufactured tensions. The longer claims remain unprocessed, the greater the profits, creating perverse incentives for systematic inefficiency.

Labour’s Hollow Opposition

Labour ministers rail against “disastrous Tory contracts” while having no intention of terminating them. The break clauses that could halt this corporate theft will remain untouched because both parties serve the same corporate interests wearing different rosettes. Rachel Reeves’ Treasury continues paying billions to the same companies that profited under Conservative rule, proving that the only thing changing hands is political rhetoric, not economic arrangements.

This exposes the fundamental fraud of British electoral politics: parties compete over managing corporate extraction rather than ending it. Whether contracts are signed by politicians wearing red or blue rosettes matters nothing to shareholders receiving public money for private profit.

The Solutions They Won’t Implement

The government could house all 32,000 asylum seekers in six purpose-built centres for a fraction of current hotel costs. The model is there. During the pandemic, they constructed a 4,000-bed Nightingale hospital for £60 million in nine days. The same urgency applied to asylum processing could slash costs while providing decent accommodation and rapid claim resolution.

Instead, ministers choose deliberate inefficiency because efficiency threatens profitable dysfunction. Hotel contracts generate greater revenue than purpose-built centres, prolonged processing creates more lucrative warehousing, and systematic chaos provides political theatre that distracts from corporate pillaging of public resources.

The International Context Ignored

Europe faces the real crisis: over 32,000 deaths in the Mediterranean since 2014, compared to 147 Channel fatalities since 2018. This disproportion reveals how Channel crossings serve as convenient distraction from broader policy failures while generating massive corporate profits unavailable from addressing Mediterranean tragedies.

The focus on British coastlines obscures the scale of continental displacement while enabling domestic profiteering that makes asylum processing a more lucrative industry than solving asylum problems.

Breaking the Cycle

Real solutions require confronting corporate capture rather than scapegoating. New readmission agreements with European partners, safe routes that undercut smuggling networks, and foreign policies addressing displacement at source could reduce dangerous crossings while eliminating profitable chaos.

But such approaches threaten revenue streams for companies that have transformed human desperation into shareholder returns. Until British politics prioritises public welfare over private profit, the boats will continue crossing not because of constitutional arrangements but because systematic inefficiency serves corporate rather than humanitarian interests.

The Reckoning Required

The boats started with Brexit myth serves power by obscuring the real scandal: the transformation of asylum policy into corporate welfare that enriches private companies while impoverishing public resources. Both Labour and Conservative parties participate in this arrangement because their donors and advisers profit from managed crisis rather than effective solutions.

Desperate people will always seek better lives, using whatever routes desperation and hope make available. The question facing Britain is whether asylum policy serves human needs or corporate greed, whether public money funds genuine solutions or private extraction, whether democracy can reclaim control from industries that profit from its failure.

The companies making billions from misery will continue thriving regardless of which party signs the cheques, until voters demand governments that serve people rather than shareholders. The boats will keep coming because the profitable dysfunction that creates them remains untouched by electoral theatre that changes everything except what matters most.