Prime Minister Keir Starmer says he will double funding for Britain’s border security agency and treat people-trafficking gangs as terrorist networks in a bid to stop migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats.

In a speech to a meeting of the international police organization Interpol on Monday, Starmer will say that the gangs behind illegal migration pose a serious threat to global security.

Claiming that “the world needs to wake up to the severity of this challenge”, Starmer will say that “we are taking our counter-terrorism approach, which we know works, and applying it to gangs”, according to extracts he released. office.

He will call for more cooperation between law enforcement agencies, closer coordination with other countries and unspecified “enhanced” law enforcement powers.

Starmer plans to increase the two-year budget of the UK Border Security Command from £75 million ($97 million) to £150 million ($194 million). The money will be used to fund high-tech surveillance equipment and 100 specialist investigators.

Like previous British Conservative governments, Starmer’s Labor Party administration is struggling to stop thousands of people fleeing war and poverty trying to reach Britain from France on flimsy, overcrowded boats.

Read moreFour migrants die trying to cross the English Channel

Over 31,000 MIGRANT have made the perilous crossing of one of the world’s busiest sea lanes so far this year, more than in all of 2023, though fewer than in 2022. At least 56 people have died in attempts this year, according to French officials, making 2024 the deadliest since the number of Channel crossings began to increase in 2018.

Starmer leads a centre-left government and raised some eyebrows in September when he visited Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and praised his nationalist conservative government’s “remarkable” progress in reducing the number of migrants arriving on Italian shores by boat.

Starmer will argue on Monday that “there is nothing progressive about turning a blind eye while men, women and children die on the canal”.

The opposition Conservative Party argues that Starmer should not have scrapped the previous government’s plan to send some asylum seekers who arrive in the UK by boat on return trips to Rwanda. Supporters of the proposal say it would act as a deterrent. Human rights groups and many lawyers say it is unethical and illegal to send migrants thousands of miles to a country where they do not want to live.

Starmer called the plan a “gimmick” and scrapped it shortly after being elected in July. Britain has paid Rwanda hundreds of millions of pounds for the plan, under an agreement signed by the two countries in 2022, without any deportations taking place.

Senior police and government officials from Interpol’s 196 member states are attending the world police body’s four-day congress in Glasgow, Scotland.

On Tuesday, Brazilian police official Valdecy Urquiza is expected to be named the new secretary-general of the organization in Lyon, France, replacing Germany’s Jürgen Stock.

(AP)