Before the ink was dry on Keir Starmer’s ‘groundbreaking’ deal to return small boat migrants to France, the sniping began.

Standing beside his opposite number in 10 Downing Street as they announced the agreement, French President Emanuel Macron chose to lecture the British people about why this was all actually their mistake.

“Many people explained that Brexit would make it more possible to fight effectively against illegal migration,” he said.

“But since Brexit the UK has no illegal migration agreement with the EU. That creates an incentive to make the crossing, the precise opposite of what Brexit promised.

“The British people were sold a lie, which was that [migration] was a problem with Europe. With your government, we’re pragmatic, and for the first time in nine years we are providing a response.”

Unsurprisingly, Reform UK leader and passionate Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage saw it differently.

He described the new arrangement, which involves opening more channels for safe and legal routes to Britain, as evidence that the country was slipping back into unofficial membership of the European Union.

“[It’s] humiliation for Brexit Britain,” he said, “we have acted today as an EU member and bowed down to an arrogant French President.”

Starmer was tough, calling the deal “unprecedented” and focusing on the headline-grabbing pilot scheme it included, which will see migrants who’d made the treacherous journey across the Channel return to France.

According to reports, the new measure will only affect around 50 people per week, a mere 6% of the total coming to Britain by small boat. Nevertheless, Macron told the media he hoped it would have a “deterrent effect.”

The trouble is that in the makeshift latrines and rain-soaked tents of Northern France’s many migrant camps, even the most ‘groundbreaking’ deterrents rarely have an impact.

Residents of the Loon-Plage ‘jungle’ near Dunkirk, where the largest contingent of migrants seeking to travel to Britain stays, rise before dawn to risk their lives on the seas and close their eyes to the sound of gunshots. The Macron-Starmer announcement was sandwiched between murders in the camp.

As Abdullah from Somalia, who was living in a tent in central Calais, pointed out, the strongest possible deterrent is already part of the equation.

“It’s a 50/50 [chance of survival on a small boat Channel crossing]. You have to take it because the difference [is] between a good life and a bad [one],” he said.

For Abdullah, the dream of life in Britain remains far more attractive than the squalor of the makeshift camp or any of the other places in Europe he passed through on his way to Calais.

“It’s better than here,” he added. “It’s not living like this.

“[There is] housing, jobs [and] you get to manage your life. If you are studying or you have [a] goal to play football or be an actor [you can try]. You can’t get that chance in France.”

Many French politicians agree and lay the blame for the small boat crisis on Britain’s lax approach to immigration and a flourishing black market.

As ex-interior minister Gerald Darmanin said in 2024, the UK is a place “where you can work without papers and where you have little chance of being expelled.”

This, of course, ignores the French treatment of migrants, which is contributing to Britain’s appeal.

The sprawling makeshift camps in Northern France exist only because, unlike in Britain, access to accommodation is far harder.

Even those who might be open to staying complain about being unable to “get papers.” One woman from Eritrea, whom I spoke to in the Loon-Plage camp, said she liked France but didn’t think it was possible to stay.

Given that in the past five years, the grant rate for asylum applications in Britain has, at times, been double that of France, there is substance to her belief that taking a small boat to the UK offers a better shot at legal status.

The woman from Eritrea, who was sharing a crate of Leffe Blonde beer in a make-shift tent with some compatriots, was well acquainted with the French authorities. She said cops visited the site every day but “didn’t cause any problems.”

This isn’t unsurprising, given that over a thousand officers from various divisions are deployed to watch over the migrants.

In the bus and train stations of Northern France, where crowds gather with lifejacket-filled plastic bags, police are never far away.

I watched how, on multiple occasions, cops themselves would marshal the crowds, which sometimes ran into the hundreds, onto buses from one coastal town to another.

Escorting the coaches along the narrow country roads, the officers would cherry-pick potential ringleaders and remove them at the final destination.

The tactic visibly disrupts groups of small boat passengers in the same way that slashing boats does, but most officers will admit it doesn’t stop the boats.

“I think there will be a lot going over today,” a heavy-set officer from the CRS division of riot police told me with a shrug of the shoulders at a beach outside Gravelines at 4am.

Although the remnants of a foiled crossing littered the sands near where their van was parked, he was resigned to the fact that favourable weather conditions would ensure that crossings would take place.

He knew the fruitless game of small boat whack-a-mole only had one outcome: The unrecognised migrants roaming the French countryside eventually get lucky and make it across. That is an inevitability accepted by both police and migrants.

The question is whether a greater effort by the authorities to learn who the migrants are and where they are coming from would change things.

“They are all illegal and undocumented,” a female officer in Gravelines told us, gesturing to a huge group that had congregated by the bus depot, “they will probably try to cross tonight.”

Clearly, she was not adverse to recording people’s information, as the Express team’s press cards and IDs were photographed, but when it came to the migrants boarding buses, there were no efforts to record details.

I saw the same approach by the police in two unmarked police cars who stopped 10 migrants hiding out in the hills above Sangatte. They too photographed my ID, but allowed the group of nameless men to leave unencumbered.

British taxpayers who’ve contributed hundreds of millions to the French police to take decisive action rather than participate in a charade might be infuriated by such tactics.

But locally, a strategy of monitoring, disrupting, but not entirely stopping departures for the English coast is exactly what people want.

Calais mayor Natacha Bouchart was “truly, very angry” at the possibility of migrants, no matter how few, returning to Northern France under Macron’s deal.

“Very clearly, we already have trouble, as mayors, managing the problem of departures,” she told radio station RTL France. “And now, we feel that we will soon be dealing with the problem of returns.

“Put yourself in our shoes, and especially put yourself in the shoes of the residents for whom we’ve seen no consideration. Because we really have difficulty managing our daily lives.”

I found a father and son from Dunkirk fishing on a beach on the outskirts of the town who put it in even more blunt terms.

“It’s misery,” the dad told me, “they are causing problems. The camps are not secure; they have guns and knives, and there is crime.

“We are all scared. It is not safe to come to the beaches and fish on your own. The camps are not clean.”

Asked whether they were opposed to any efforts to stop the boats, the father was clear.

“Yes, because then they would stay here. When they go to England, it’s fine, but in the areas near the camps, it’s not safe.”

Both felt that Macron’s efforts should be prioritising making France safer rather than working with the UK to stop boats.

“We know that England is not better than here,” the son added, “but the migrants don’t realise that.”

We will only really know when the first migrants who’ve braved the journey across the Channel are returning to France, whether their warnings for others will have any deterring effect.

But given that they already view a small boat crossing as a coin toss between life and death, a 6% chance of deportation is unlikely to prove much of a disincentive.