RAKIB EHSAN: Young male migrants are tearing apart the fabric of our villages and towns

We’ve become used to referring to the endless flow of illegal migrants arriving on our shores as the ‘small boats’ crisis.

But the truth is that, these days, they are anything but. One mega craft that made landfall in the early hours of yesterday was carrying no fewer than 230 people, the largest number to make the journey in a single vessel.

That’s the equivalent of more than 20 football teams. If they all lived in one place, we’d be forced to describe it as a village rather than a hamlet.

Andy Burnham may claim that Labour’s ‘plan’ to stop the boats is ‘working’, but if there was ever a symbol of the Government’s abject failure to get a grip on the migrant issue, this was it.

Our new Prime Minister feels most content in the comfort zone of his ‘bring back hope’ campaign – propagating feel-good policies to address the cost of living, the health and social care crisis and devolution.

But the reality is that the small-boats crisis has been hugely disruptive of local civic life the length and breadth of the country.

The recent disturbances in the Norfolk town of Thetford are only the latest example of what happens when you put large numbers of usually single, young males from countries such as Afghanistan, Eritrea and Sudan, into areas which are ethnically, religiously and culturally homogenous.

Over the past few decades, East Anglian market towns such as Thetford have become popular with former Cockneys, who felt they had been pushed out of the East End. Now they find themselves in a situation in which their local services – from GPs’ surgeries and dentists to schools and hospitals – are increasingly over-stretched.

Residents now they find themselves in a situation in which their local services – from GPs’ surgeries and dentists to schools and hospitals – are increasingly over-stretched

And the demographic profile of the new arrivals – plus cultural attitudes towards women and gay people that can create tensions – all too often means law and order becomes an issue. None of this is conducive to a peaceful community life, something that is an important ingredient of a healthy standard of living.

If Andy Burnham, a politician who constantly trumpets his aim of bringing growth to ‘every postcode’, truly understood this, he would do his utmost to get to grips with the ongoing small-boats emergency.

As previous work by the Policy Exchange think-tank has shown, illegal migrants are often housed in the country’s poorer areas.

Shifting illegal migrants from hotels to other forms of accommodation, such as former military bases and HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation), is akin to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

The answer is to deter economic migrants from making the journey to Britain in the first place.

Some claim that it’s possible to deter migrants without leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) by cutting migrant benefits, deporting foreign criminals and forcing illegals to live in reception centres. Australia is a poster boy for this sort of hardheaded approach. Under its Operation Sovereign Borders policy launched in 2013, migrant boats were intercepted and either returned to where they had travelled from or their occupants taken to detention centres on islands such as Papua New Guinea off Australia’s northern coast or the Pacific island of Nauru.

Within a year, illegal immigration by boat had fallen to zero.

But the lesson of recent years is that attempts to introduce such measures in the UK are invariably thwarted by our brigades of human rights lawyers, who launch actions citing the rights granted to migrants by the European Convention on Human Rights.

The only effective answer is for us to leave the ECHR, end our self-defeating policy of offering legal aid to migrants and return them to their country of origin. As Australia has shown, the effect of such an approach can be almost immediate.

The sad thing is that I don’t for one second think that Mr Burnham has the mettle to go down such a path.

Dr Rakib Ehsan is a researcher in immigration and asylum.