Keir Starmer failed to stop the boats and now the question is whether new Prime Minister Andy Burnham will face the same challenge. On Wednesday (July 22), GB News came to a halt to announce that a “mega dinghy” had launched from a beach in France. The boat left from a beach called Équihen-Plage, located in the south of Boulogne.

Reacting to the footage they had witnessed, White said there was “absolute chaos” in the water as the boat, already packed with migrants, headed towards the beach to pick up “several dozen more”. He continued: “Most of them couldn’t even get onto the vessel. They were left scrambling about, trying to get on that dinghy, many of them falling back into the water. French rescue crafts were zipping about and plucking people out of the water.”

White admitted there was one scene in particular which “took his breath away”, explaining how a mother attempted to get her two young children onto the boat, but was prevented by police.

“One of them could barely have been two years old, just learning to walk. She’s trying to get past police officers to get down into the water. Police officers pushed her back onto the beach,” he said.

“How reckless is that, to take very young children into water to try and scramble aboard a boat offshore?”

He claimed that the majority of migrants who die attempting the crossing are women and children because “men push them off”.

White went on: “Although this was a mega dinghy, which can easily carry up to 120 people or more, it carried 80 to UK waters. But that’s simply because of the chaos where people couldn’t get on board that boat.

The channel’s home and security editor pointed out that despite the country having a new prime minister, the illegal migration crisis remains.

He observed: “What it shows, just a few days into Andy Burnham’s time in office, is this crisis has not gone away. Yes, numbers are lower than they were at this time last year, but that can be made up by a run of good days, by switching tactics from the people smugglers.

“It’s certainly not something that the government can be complacent about. The pictures today show you the determination of people smugglers to cram even more people dangerously onto these boats.”