The wrong boats.

The right has gotten away with its immigration scaremongering for too long. We're looking at the wrong damned boats.

Last night on Facebook I saw a series of comments under a story from a national newspaper saying that the British public has to start preparing itself for a war. It’s a situation I’ll cover in more detail in another post, but the very idea that we have to start thinking in those terms is grotesque.

It would represent a failure of diplomacy on a breathtaking scale. It is the worst kind of scaremongering I’ve seen in my life.

But it wasn’t the suggestion that we might have to prepare for armed conflict with Russia or some other unlikely foe that really infuriated me. What infuriated me were the comments themselves—many of them among the most ignorant, far-right, anti-immigrant trash you’ll ever come across.

Social media has become a breeding ground for empty-headed cretins promoting theories so thunderously stupid that you genuinely fear for the future just reading them.

These people seem genuinely afraid that the invasion of this country has already started, and that the invaders aren’t soldiers or armies or foreign agents—but people crowding into dinghies crossing the sea and risking life and limb to seek refuge here. Somehow, through years of toxic rhetoric and wilful scapegoating by both Conservative and Labour governments, they’ve been painted as an existential threat.

This idea—that these people are responsible for the state this country is in—is so widespread on social media that it makes me want to quit altogether.

And there are days when I think I stay just so I can fight back against the endless torrent of rubbish.

To be frank, we’re looking at the wrong boats.

Here’s a fact you might not know.

Jeff Bezos owns a 417-foot superyacht called Koru that cost him $500 million. As grotesque as that sounds in a world where people still don’t have clean water, you ain’t heard nothing yet. Bezos doesn’t go anywhere in that yacht without it being tailed by a second yacht, a 246-foot vessel he also owns, called Abeona.

That’s his “support vessel.”

It exists because Koru doesn’t have a helipad. Abeona carries the helicopter, the water sports toys, and various other bits and pieces he doesn’t want cluttering up the main boat. That one only cost him a more modest $100 million.

The running costs for both are estimated between $50–75 million a year.

That’s the personal property of one man.

One individual.

And that’s only the boats. We haven’t even talked about the private jets, the helicopters, the luxury homes dotted all over the globe, and the cost of maintaining all of it. Bezos likely owns over a billion dollars’ worth of personal luxury assets. Let me put that in perspective for you.

The people on those dinghies trying to cross the Channel come with the shirts on their backs. They risk drowning to live—if they’re allowed to live—in the worst housing we can find for them. Most will work in the black economy for less than minimum wage, doing the kind of work you wouldn’t touch with a barge pole.

If you think they are why we have food banks in this country you’re a fucking moron.

One of the most absurd lies is that they are coming here and living off the welfare system. Anyone who believes that has not done a scintilla of research into the subject. As illegals they aren’t entitled to one penny of social security. Not one. Not a bean. Those people come here with nothing expecting to get nothing. Even those who qualify for legal status don’t get access to all the benefits – if we’re calling them that – of Britain’s social security safety net.

Would it surprise you to know that most of the people who come through the system legally aren’t entitled to social security? The Daily Mail doesn’t holler that one back at you, does it? No, but it’s true nonetheless. It’s called NRPF ... No Recourse To Public Funds. Not even if you’re working and pay taxes.

You can claim Universal Credit, but only after you’ve been here for a certain amount of time and jumped through many, many, many government hoops beforehand.

If you are claiming asylum you are entitled to housing, but as anyone knows that means staying in cramped, shitty hostel accommodation and trying to live on £47 a week. And here’s the kicker for those who sneer at that; that money is all they have, because you are not allowed to work whilst your claim is being processed.

“But a lot of them are criminals,” I hear people say.

Okay. Let’s talk about that.

The majority of them commit no crimes at all until they get here. And even then, “criminality” usually means being trafficked into prostitution or blackmailed into doing the bidding of actual criminals—British criminals, white criminals, the ones with money and infrastructure and contacts and cars.

Between 2018 and mid-2023, approximately 9% of small boat arrivals—around 8,000 people—were referred into the National Referral Mechanism as potential victims of modern slavery or human trafficking.

Of those referrals, 78% were confirmed victims.

Forced into car washes. Into construction sites. Into brothels. Onto street corners or takeaway shifts or flogging fake IDs or selling drugs they didn’t want to touch. Many of them arrive already in debt to smugglers, and those debts are enforced with fists and threats.

This is not a criminal class. These people are victims. They are people forced to break laws to survive because they are denied any legal path to do so.

When the state criminalises people before it lets them live legally, it creates the very black economy it then claims to oppose.

Compare their boats to the other boats. The ones moored in Monaco. In St. Tropez. In the Caymans. These are the boats of the global elite—owned by the same people who move money offshore, exploit loopholes, and bankroll governments with donations and lobbying efforts.

Bezos, as we’ve seen, owns luxury assets in excess of £1 billion. Amazon has become the poster child for legal-but-immoral tax avoidance.

Amazon UK Services paid just £81.3 million in corporation tax in 2023. That’s despite revenues of £6.9 billion. Campaigners estimate the company avoided roughly £433 million in tax that year through intergroup payments and financial sleight of hand.

Across a decade, Amazon and five other US tech giants (Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix) paid an average of just 18.8% in tax—well below the 30%+ statutory rates in countries like the UK and US. The rates people like us pay.

According to the Tax Justice Network, the UK loses between £35–70 billion a year to tax avoidance and evasion. Globally, that figure climbs to $427 billion. This is money we need. That could feed a lot of hungry kids and heat a lot of pensioners homes.

It could rebuild infrastructure. It could fund housing. It could fill the NHS staffing gaps. But instead of chasing it, our politics prefers to kick the people in dinghies.

Meanwhile, there’s a third kind of boat that also escapes scrutiny—the ones with guns.

The Royal Navy.

The UK defence budget stands at £54 billion for 2024/25, rising to nearly £60 billion by 2026. That includes £6.2 billion for two aircraft carriers and £31 billion for a new fleet of nuclear submarines. Delays and cost overruns in their construction have already cost taxpayers another £1.5 billion.

And it’s not stopping there.

The government wants to push military spending to 4.1% of GDP by 2027, and potentially 5% by 2035. That would mean an extra £40 billion a year. The short-term “battle-ready” plan already has a projected cost of £67.6 billion.

And all this? It’s to prepare for a war with a country—Russia—that hasn’t managed to beat Ukraine in four years. Those spending plans also include a commitment to spend billions more on battlefield nuclear weapons.

The wrong boats get all the attention. The ones filled with people running for their lives. The other ones—the yachts, the destroyers—slip by unnoticed. Or worse, get celebrated. But ask yourself this: what are we really defending?

The Royal Navy doesn’t stop tax avoidance. It doesn’t inspect superyachts to see what wealth might be salted away on board. The small boats—full of desperate people—are the only ones treated as threats. If sovereignty and national security are the concern, why is enforcement never aimed at the ultra-wealthy looting the system? Why does the fury always flow downward?

Let’s lay the numbers side by side:

Small boat migrants cost the UK maybe £300–600 million a year. Defence spending absorbs £54–60 billion annually. Planned increases could add another £40 billion a year. Amazon alone avoids £400 million annually in tax. The total tax avoidance and evasion drain on the UK is between £35 and £70 billion a year.

The truth is obvious.

The migrants in dinghies are the least of our problems.

The UK economy is being bled dry—not by refugees or asylum seekers—but by tax avoidance, military overspending, and political cowardice. And yeah, if you’re mouthing off on Facebook and you didn’t know all that ... then you have to wonder if you’re just a dickhead whose head has been filled with right wing rot.

But you do know now, right?

And now you’ve no excuse.