Small Boats

Three women, reportedly aged about twenty, thirty and fifty, were found unresponsive on a boat near Dunkirk. In a separate incident farther south, a man died after a dinghy capsized. Others, including a small child, were rescued.

The British government says every death in the Channel is a tragedy.

Then it blames the smugglers.

This has become the ritual language of the border: sorrow without responsibility, compassion without consequence, death presented as an unfortunate by-product of somebody else’s criminal enterprise.

But the smugglers do not create the fundamental demand for boats.

The border does.

The United Kingdom does not operate a general asylum visa. A person abroad cannot ordinarily apply to the Home Office for permission to travel safely to Britain in order to claim asylum. To make a claim, the person normally has to be physically present in the UK. Existing humanitarian programmes are limited, selective and generally dependent on nationality, family links, government schemes or UNHCR referral.

The state therefore issues two simultaneous commands:

Do not cross the Channel irregularly.

And:

You cannot ask us for asylum until you have reached us.

That contradiction is not a technical fault in the system.

It is the system.

The obscene superego is an authority that issues impossible instructions and then punishes the subject for failing to obey them.

Be spontaneous.

Enjoy yourself.

Tell the truth, but not that truth.

Seek asylum, but do not arrive.

The migrant is ordered to present a legitimate claim while being denied the legitimate means of presenting it. If she reaches Britain by boat, her mode of arrival is used against her. If she remains in France, Britain says she should claim protection there. If she seeks a safe British route, she discovers that for most people no such route exists.

The impossibility is then attributed to the migrant as moral failure.

She did not wait.

She did not use the proper channel.

She paid a criminal.

She entered illegally.

The state manufactures the prohibited route, closes the alternatives and then discovers criminality in the person forced to take it.

This is why “smash the gangs” is such a useful slogan. The smuggler becomes the fantasy object onto which the state transfers everything it refuses to recognise about itself.

The gang is greedy.

The gang is ruthless.

The gang places women and children in danger.

All true.

But the gang occupies a market created by sovereign policy. Remove one smuggler and another appears because the underlying structure remains: people with reasons to reach Britain and no safe procedure through which to request entry.

The government speaks as though the smugglers have invaded a previously peaceful landscape.

In reality, the smugglers are subcontractors of the border.

They supply the passage the state refuses to provide.

The more completely the legal route is closed, the more valuable and dangerous their service becomes.

That is why larger numbers are being forced into increasingly overcrowded boats. The average load has risen dramatically since the first small-boat crossings. The economic logic is obvious: enforcement increases costs, so smugglers maximise the return from each departure by placing more human beings into each inflatable hull.

The deterrence policy does not remove the market.

It makes the product more lethal.

The border must nevertheless continue to declare itself innocent.

Fetishistic disavowal: I know very well, but nevertheless.

We know that people will continue trying to reach Britain.

We know that many cannot apply safely from abroad.

We know that overcrowded boats sink.

We know that deterrence displaces routes rather than abolishing desire.

We know that women, men and children will die.

But nevertheless, we behave as though every death were an unforeseeable outrage committed solely by a criminal gang.

The bodies are therefore both denied and required.

Denied, because no democratic government can admit that death is built into its policy.

Required, because the danger performs deterrence.

The Channel must be seen to be frightening. The crossing must carry a price. Otherwise the threat—do not come—has no material force.

The drowned body becomes the message the government cannot officially send.

This is what the border says:

Look what happens when you disobey.

The government does not need consciously to desire an individual death. Institutions do not desire in the simple manner of individuals. The death functions structurally. It demonstrates that the border is real, that sovereignty has teeth, that entry cannot occur without suffering.

And then the dead are transformed into evidence for more of the policy that helped kill them.

Another tragedy proves the gangs are evil.

The evil of the gangs proves enforcement must intensify.

Intensified enforcement makes crossings more concentrated, expensive and dangerous.

The next deaths prove the need for still greater enforcement.

The policy feeds on its own casualties.

Lacan called this enjoyment jouissance: not ordinary pleasure, but the excessive, painful satisfaction produced by repeating the very structure that causes suffering.

British politics says it wants the crossings to stop.

Yet it organises itself around the spectacle of the crossings.

Journalists filming frightened people entering the water.

The migrant boat has become one of the central images through which Britain imagines its lost sovereignty.

Without the boat, the government loses the scene in which it can perform control.

Without the “invasion”, it loses the fantasy of the nation under siege.

Without the criminal foreign other, it might have to confront the actual sources of social collapse: housing shortages, low wages, failing public services, extreme inequality and decades of political choices made in Westminster rather than Damascus, Kabul, Khartoum or Dunkirk.

The migrant is made to carry these contradictions.

She becomes the explanation for the hospital queue, the unaffordable flat, the overcrowded classroom and the country’s strange sense of decline.

Her body plugs the hole in the national story.

The hated object is imagined to possess the thing stolen from us: security, housing, benefits, attention, enjoyment. We believe that if the intruder were removed, society would become whole again.

But society was never whole.

The border cannot restore what did not exist.

So it repeats the spectacle.

The government says its plan is working because crossings have declined. Yet people continue to board boats, and four more are dead.

A reduction in the body count crossing successfully is not the same as a humane asylum policy.

Nor is a future promise of limited safe routes an answer to people who have no safe route now. The government has announced that new pathways will begin in the autumn, but their scale, eligibility and accessibility will determine whether they offer a genuine alternative or merely another exception proving the rule.

Why can these people not obtain safe passage?

Because safe passage would transform the political meaning of the encounter.

A person arriving with a visa, boarding a ferry and presenting an asylum claim at a designated office is no longer an invading mass breaking through Britain’s defences.

She becomes a person.

A name.

A file.

A story that must be heard and judged on its facts.

Safe passage would move asylum from theatre into administration.

It would deprive politicians of the boat.

It would reduce the smuggler’s market.

It would also force Britain to say openly how many people it is prepared to protect, under what criteria, and why.

The current system avoids that responsibility by allowing danger to decide.

Those strong, rich, lucky or desperate enough to survive the journey reach the asylum system.

Some of the others drown.

The boats cross because there is no safe passage.

There is no safe passage because the danger is politically useful.

And the government calls the result a tragedy, as though tragedy were something that simply happens, rather than something built, funded, defended and repeated.