Why Tony Smith says deterrence matters more than gang arrests

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 30:31

   What do they do? And the second part of the question is going to be, well, Keir Starmer said he was going to smash the gangs, quote unquote. I mean, they are very much unsmashed. Yeah. So you're never going to be able to smash international organised criminal gangs. You know, that's cloud cuckoo land. You can mitigate the risk. You can try and disrupt their activities. But this is international organised crime.

2. 30:55

   It's like drug smuggling. You're never going to be at it. Stamp it out. There's too much money in it. There's too big of a market. There's too many networks. So it goes right the way back to source countries. Actually, I chair conferences around the world in various places. I've been to the Philippines, I chair conferences there. Africa, I'm chairing a conference there next month where there are some good people working for governments.

3. 31:15

   UK, UK are trying to smash the gangs, if you like, to try and identify. But it's really, really hard because some of this is so lucrative that it's almost lost in business as usual. So people are being trafficked. They are being smuggled out. People will pay money to a middleman to say, now, you know, first stage, going to get you out of this country and into that country. That's where you're going to go.

4. 31:38

   You're going to go overland from this country to that country. And that's where you're going to meet the next, which is the level two smuggler. He's the middleman. He's got a staging house for you. And you get moved exponentially through the food chain right the way up to the French border. So it's a massive network. Now, you have had some successes, to be fair, at the National Crime Agency, I know those blokes as well.

5. 31:58

   I mean, they're trying their best, you know. But these are things that are going on miles away from here, miles away from here, where you can't really penetrate the government and the enforcement agencies in those countries. All you can do is do whatever intelligence you can. So I would say that to say you're going to smash the gangs is a little bit naive, I'm afraid. I think, you know, Keir Starmer, it seems when he came in, he's clearly come from a criminal justice background.

6. 32:21

   Criminal justice systems don't work against illegal immigration. There's no point in taking a bit of a court. There's no point trying to prosecute them, I mean, because you won't even find out who they are. And even if you do, what's going to happen at court? What you've really got to do is take out the supply chain. You've got to take out the money. The most important thing, though, you should do is break the business model, right?

7. 32:38

   What is the business? Why do they do it? Why do you think smugglers operate? They're the money. There's money in there. They wouldn't bother. So how do you stop people wanting to come here in the first place? The only way you've got to do that is so you're not going to get in because it ain't going to work. So as soon as you... That's why I supported the Rwanda plan, is actually what we would have been able to say if we could ever get that through, would be that it doesn't follow you're going to get in to stay in England, you're going to end up living in Rwanda.

8. 33:07

   You can still come if you like, but we're going to send you back to Rwanda. I think that would have had a deterrent effect. So I think there are removals is the key. You've got to get back to removers, and they will tell you they're removing more people than ever before. Yes, they are, but they're not removing boat arrivals. Only about 4% of boat arrivals get removed because you've got the asylum, ECHR, all of those problems.

9. 33:29

   And they come from countries where it's really hard to remove people too. So long as that business model prevails, the smugglers will continue to draw down profits. So long as they draw down profits, there's going to be a gang. You take one gang out, it's like whack-a-mole, another gang will spring up because there's big money in this. And there's networks going right around the world. So, really, you can't rely necessarily on being able to disrupt international smuggling networks to stop the boats.

10. 33:56

    It will have an impact, and I think there has been some impacts in changes of tactics we've seen recently, where, you know, some of the smaller boats are harder now, but they've moved to bigger boats and they've moved to other routes, and they will continue to move their operation in my experience of dealing with them. It's like a game of chess. You know, when they make a move, you've got to make a move as well.

11. 34:15

    You've got to try and stay ahead of the game, but you're never going to win the game. unless you can actually break the business model, and that's what we've not been able to do. Tony, you talked about third country, which is France.