More people were killed in the Channel by the UK government’s racist asylum policies. This is a national disgrace.

It’s a tragedy made worse by the fact it is preventable – the predictable result of our government’s hostile policy choices.

People making Channel crossings from France are seeking safety in the UK. In 2025, 99 per cent of people arriving this way submitted an asylum claim, exercising their human rights under the Refugee Convention.

It isn’t possible to apply for asylum from outside the UK, yet the government provides almost no safe routes for people to arrive here and seek protection – even when they come from countries such as Afghanistan and Sudan, where the UK has played a major role in creating the conditions that force people to flee.

It’s a national disgrace that people are forced to risk their lives in the Channel, having survived war and persecution in their countries and suffered indignity and violence in northern France.

Since taking power in 2024, this government has joined the chorus of anti-refugee voices calling people crossing the Channel “illegal”.

But the Refugee Convention does not require people to arrive in a particular way to seek asylum.

And when people do arrive by regular routes, such as student visas, and later claim asylum, the government calls this “abuse” and bans whole nationalities from using them.

How are people supposed to exercise their basic human right to safety?

French authorities say the people killed on Thursday morning were "already quite far into the sea" when they tried to board a boat and were swept away by a strong tide.

This is a direct consequence of French policing operations that have forced people to attempt ever more dangerous boardings, further from the shore and in deeper water.

These operations are funded by UK public money to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds per year.

People seeking safety are being killed in the Channel by policies that prioritise a failed "deterrence" strategy over human lives and human rights.

Given that the vast majority are people of colour from countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, this amounts of a form of lethal and systemic state racism.

The government responds with platitudes or “tough talk” about smugglers. But this only underscores the lack of care for these people’s lives, which are so devalued by our hostile asylum system.

Many people ask: “why don’t they stay in France?”

Quite simply, for the dozens of people seeking safety that I have spoken to in and around Calais over the past year – for new Refugee Action research out next week – France is not a “safe country”.

People on the move in northern France are racially profiled, harassed by police, and assaulted and abused regularly.

They are forced to live unhoused, in appalling conditions, at informal living sites, with access to food, water, and sanitation denied by the state.

They are subjected to brutal police “clearances” every 48 hours, with tents, blankets, children’s toys, and even life vests snatched.

This violent, racist treatment is funded with UK public money.

Asylum is an issue of racial justice for the UK. It’s past time this government woke up to these facts and invested the money it wastes on harming people at the UK-France border in providing safe asylum routes instead.

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Ben Whitham is Senior Policy and Research Officer at Refugee Action.

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