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Record numbers of migrants spent their life savings to cross the Channel in April. Tragically some, including children, paid the highest price. RT joins the hunt for the people smugglers — and meets those prepared to risk everything to reach Britain
To Catch a Scorpion
Available from Friday 3 May on BBC Sounds
The English Channel is calm tonight and cloud has covered the moon. “Perfect conditions for a crossing,” says Rob Lawrie, as we peer into the gloom of a hotel car park on the edge of Dunkirk. I’m squeezed inside a hatchback with the 55-yearold former soldier from West Yorkshire. With us there’s a photographer who has recently returned from Lebanon and Sue Mitchell the BBC radio journalist who, alongside Lawrie, is also an award-winning podcaster.
Mitchell is explaining why people smugglers bring migrants to hotels before they make crossing attempts. “If they leave them in the camps then competitors might tempt them with safer boats and they’d lose their money.” There’s a lot of money to be made. Migrants’ payments are released on their safe arrival, each successful crossing costs between £3,000 and £4,000, so 60 migrants, all squeezed into a single, 11 metre-long rubber boat, can mean a huge pay day – if no one drowns.
Mitchell suspects there’s a group of migrants gathering right now in the hotel that we’re watching. Lawrie, meanwhile, is texting contacts across Europe and the Middle East, seeking information. His mobile bleeps with incoming messages. “Here’s confirmation,” he says, as a new one arrives. “Three boats got over this morning, and more will go tonight.” Lawrie’s contacts, smugglers themselves or well positioned in that shadowy world, have been built up over the best part of his decade as an aid worker while making podcasts with Mitchell that track the flow of migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
Many of those migrants end up here in northern France, where they gather in unsanitary makeshift camps, ready to embark on the perilous journey across one of the busiest waterways in the world. More than 40,000 have done this since October 2022, fleeing war, poverty and hopelessness in their homelands. Nearly 400 have drowned or come to grief in other ways since 1999; most terribly, the 39 Vietnamese men and women – ten of them teenagers – who suffocated in the back of a lorry at Grays, Essex, in 2019. Death is ever preswe arrive in France, four people have drowned attempting to cross the Channel, one of them a seven-year-old girl. And yet, still they come. “If you put me in a dinghy and said, ‘Sail to Dover,’
I’d be scared,” says Lawrie. “But they d
