By Julia Hartley-Brewer

IMAGINE you live in a basket case country like Afghanistan, Eritrea or Iraq. 

Now imagine your entire family have saved up to fund the dangerous journey for you to get to Libya, where you then pay armed smuggling gangs to get you over the Mediterranean. 

Then imagine arriving in Greece or Italy and making your way across Europe to get to the beaches of Calais, where you pay £1,500 to another gang so you can wade into the water to get on a rickety small boat overcrowded with 50 strangers to risk your life crossing one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world to get to the land of milk and honey in Britain. 

But wait! The British Prime Minister has just announced that if you make it here, you face a one-in-17 chance of eventually being sent back to France. 

Do you say: “Oh well, in that case I’ll give up and head back to Eritrea?” 

Of course you don’t! You get on that dinghy and head out to sea. 

This, I suspect, may be the fundamental flaw in Keir Starmer’s latest cunning plan to cut migrant crossings: IT WON’T WORK. 

Not that this stopped the PM confidently announcing his new “one in, one out” migrant deal with great fanfare at the end of his Downing Street summit with French President Emmanuel ­Macron on ­Thursday. 

Instead of “smashing the gangs”, as he promised to do last year, Starmer has decided to play swapsies with ­Macron by agreeing to take a supposedly “genuine” asylum seeker from France in return for every illegal Channel migrant we return to them. 

The two men announced the plan for a trial of this migrant exchange scheme, to start later this summer, with initially just 50 Channel migrants being sent back to France each week, in return for 50 asylum seekers coming here. 

Fifty migrants account for just one in 17 (or less than six per cent) of the 44,000 illegal migrants who have arrived on ­dinghies in the past 12 months of this Labour Government. 

Indeed, more than 600 migrants were picked up in the Channel on Thursday alone.

That’s 12 weeks’ worth of exchanges coming in just one day. 

So I, like everyone else, have some questions about this much-touted plan to stop the boats. 

How long will the trial last? What will count as a “successful” trial? How many people do they eventually hope to swap if the trial is extended?

Oh, and my final question: Are they out of their friggin’ minds? 

Because Starmer must be ­absolutely barmy if he thinks voters are going to fall for this nonsense. We don’t want “one in, one out”. 

We want “NONE in, ALL out”! 

There are so many problems with this plan that it’s difficult to find the space to list them all, but I’ll have a go ­anyway. 

First, as I’ve already pointed out, the chances of ever being sent back to France are so vanishingly small that they don’t ­provide any deterrent. 

And even if a Channel migrant was among the unlucky few sent back to France, he would simply head back to the beaches at Calais and pay the smuggling gangs for a place on another dinghy. 

Added to that, as Macron rightly said in his Westminster speech this week, Britain is the first-choice destination for a third of all illegal migrants who arrive in Europe because of the “pull factors” that this new plan will do nothing to end. 

After all, why stay in France — where you get nothing — when you can come to Britain and get housed in a hotel or even your own flat, be given some spending money and are free to work in the black market as a food delivery rider or any other job, without any realistic risk of ever being deported?

That’s why the smuggling gangs are making fortunes, with hundreds every day paying upwards of £1,500 each for a place on a small boat, with Eritreans, Afghans and Somalians now making up the largest number of arrivals on our shores.

The French authorities claim to have stopped 12,000 migrants from crossing so far this year, but almost double that ­number — at least 21,000 — have successfully made it across, a 48 per cent increase compared with the first six months of 2024.

And all of this ignores the huge backlog of tens of thousands of arrivals in the past few years, with 32,000 asylum seekers still in hotels, while we fund the rents for ­hostels and flats for tens of thousands more.

Another major flaw in this plan is that the so-called ­legitimate asylum seekers coming from France via a “safe route” will be chosen from those who have a family link to someone already here.

After all, why stay in France — where you get nothing — when you can come to Britain and get housed in a hotel or even your own flat, be given some spending money and are free to work in the black market as a food delivery rider or any other job, without any realistic risk of ever being deported?

That’s why the smuggling gangs are making fortunes, with hundreds every day paying upwards of £1,500 each for a place on a small boat, with Eritreans, Afghans and Somalians now making up the largest number of arrivals on our shores.

The French authorities claim to have stopped 12,000 migrants from crossing so far this year, but almost double that ­number — at least 21,000 — have successfully made it across, a 48 per cent increase compared with the first six months of 2024.

And all of this ignores the huge backlog of tens of thousands of arrivals in the past few years, with 32,000 asylum seekers still in hotels, while we fund the rents for ­hostels and flats for tens of thousands more.

Another major flaw in this plan is that the so-called ­legitimate asylum seekers coming from France via a “safe route” will be chosen from those who have a family link to someone already here.

Quite why anyone should have a right to come here just because their uncle lives in Leicester is beyond me but, more worryingly, what’s to stop those asylum seekers from bringing in their entire extended ­families, from their wife and kids to their parents, siblings, brothers-in-law, long-lost second cousins and everyone in between?

And then THEIR relatives would claim a right to come here too!

We’d end up swapping one migrant for an entire village.

We’ll also see the rise of a brand new money-making racket for the criminal gangs: Rent A Relative.

If you want to apply for asylum in the UK, the gangs will find a suitable “brother”, “cousin” or “in-law” living in Bradford to vouch for you, in return for a hefty fee.

Meanwhile, if the number of deportation exchanges is ever ramped up at the end of the trial to the thousands needed to offer some deterrent to making the ­Channel crossing, we all know what will happen: The migrant arrivals will quickly disappear from their hotels and hostels and into the black market, never to be seen again.