Is the government's small boats plan "in tatters"?
The News Agents
Global
4.1 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 23 October 2025
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Keir Starmer came to power vowing to smash the gangs and stop the boats. He believes in the power of returns agreements to solve the problem - and established the 'one in - one out' system with France. An irregular migrant is returned for each refugee who has gone through the process properly. But, in a moment of low farce and high tragedy, an Iranian man - one of the very first to be sent back to France - turned back up on these shores on a small boat for a second time. So much for a deterrent, it would seem. So is the system broken? And could Labour now be thinking the unthinkable about the cancelled Rwanda plan?
Later, Wikipedia is reaching its 25th anniversary. The total sum of human knowledge freely available online - and powered by volunteers. How did such a vast, ambitious and optimistic idea ever come off? We speak to founder Jimmy Wales about tech billionaires, trust and human nature.
The News Agents is brought to you by HSBC UK - https://www.hsbc.co.uk/
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:09.2 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:12.7 | The government promised it had a plan for illegal migration. |
| 0:15.8 | They called it the one-in, one-out deal with France. |
| 0:19.0 | But the guy who was thrown out is now back in. Is that whole deal |
| 0:25.1 | in tatters? Kyr Starma is denying that is the case. But Shabana Mahmoud, the Home Secretary, |
| 0:31.5 | has said the numbers entering the UK are shameful. Is the government failing to get to grips with the small boat crisis? Welcome to the |
| 0:41.1 | newsagents. The news agents. It's John. It's Emily. It's Lewis. And the past 48 hours in dealing with |
| 0:53.8 | small boat arrivals in the UK has not been exactly fantastic. |
| 0:59.1 | Yesterday, somebody who was part of the one-in, one-out scheme, who was sent back to France. |
| 1:05.7 | Guess what? |
| 1:06.5 | Was back on a small boat, back on British shores. |
| 1:09.1 | Who knew you could get a season ticket for small boats? |
| 1:12.8 | Also, we've heard overnight the French government sort of saying, yeah, I know, I know we're being |
| 1:18.5 | paid all this money to do all this stuff on the French beaches, but it's all spin, really. We're not |
| 1:23.5 | going to be wading into the water to slash any boats. We're just there to kind of make it look like we're doing something, |
| 1:29.3 | but we're not really doing anything. |
| 1:31.0 | And all of this comes at a time when the number of people arriving on small boats has hit a record high. |
| 1:39.3 | So I guess the question I have in all this is that we have always gone back to the principle that the thing that |
| 1:46.8 | made the small boats so much worse, so much harder, was the post-Brexit settlement, which |
| 1:52.8 | left us out on our own. You know, we didn't really have friends. Boris Johnson had done his level |
| 1:57.2 | best to really piss off the French amongst others. And certainly in the last |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Global, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Global and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.