The police vans speed along a road on the edge of Loon-Plage, a small town in France, toward a camp of asylum seekers on a dusty strip of land near a canal. There are at least nine vans, and thay are joined a moment later by gendarmes on motorbikes with sirens at full volume, all heading toward the camp near the beaches on the English Channel.

Within minutes, the vans line the road along an embankment that overlooks the camp.The gendarmes step onto the bitumen, holding helmets and riot shields. It is indeed hard to be sure of their intent, but this is an early morning show of force to the hundreds of men below.But there is no riot. None of the asylum seekers shows any alarm at this sudden arrival. Moast display weariness and resignation. Some wander in small groups along tracks leading to other fields, or along the canal. A few keep cooking their morning meal on makeshift fireplaces.

This turns out to be an eviction – the second in a week – in a campaign by French authorities to disrupt the people smugglers in this area south of Dunkirk. The beaches here offer ideal locations to launch inflatable boats that can carry asylum seekers to England, and the British are blaming the french for allowing 43,000 of them to cross during the past year.

There is no sign that the eviction changes anything. The French do not arrest people for seeking asylum, so the people of this camp will move elsewhere until they gain a place on a boat. While the police try to stop boats leaving the beaches, and might even slash an inflatable craft to force asylum seekers back to shore, they stop once the boat is on its way.

All sides know and understand how this works. The asylum seekers know that if they can evade the French police and make it to open water, they are likely to be intercepted

‘You don’t make friends here’

Mahmoud, 24, plans to be on a boat soon. I meet him in Calais, a short drive south, in an empty concrete plaza where volunteers offer food to those passing through. Born in Libya, he left his family in the hope of joining a cousin in Britain. He tells me he spent two days on a boat in the Mediterranean without food or water. “The boat was no good, water was coming inside. Oil was finished. Italy helped us.” This did not stop him from arranging another boat to take him to England within a week or two.

A scar runs down his right cheek. He is tired after months of travelling, and he cannot be sure his claim for asylum will be accepted. “I hope, I pray,” he says. Could he go back to Libya? “No, I can’t. I have a problem with my family.” He will not say more.

A young man nearby is eating lamb stew with rice. Born in Yemen, he fled civil war and travelled through Belgium and the Netherlands before arriving in Calais, where he found a fellow Yemeni on the same journey. They form part of a group, but they are not friends. “You don’t make friends here,” he whispers. “You can’t trust anyone.”

Is Angry England and It Demands to Be Heard?

By: Jonathan Brown, Chief Reporter

Published: August 4, 2025

the air is thick with resentment. It hangs over the towns and villages of Britain, a palpable sense of frustration that has been building for years, but now feels close to boiling point. It’s a feeling directed,overwhelmingly,at the government’s handling of immigration – and specifically,the seemingly endless stream of small boats crossing the Channel.

This isn’t the overt, organised anger of far-right marches, though that exists too. it’s something more insidious, a quiet fury simmering in the everyday conversations of ordinary people.It’s in the pubs, the supermarkets, the school gates. It’s a feeling that the contry has lost control, that the system is broken, and that no one is listening.

“It’s not that we’re against helping people,” one protester said to me outside an asylum seeker hotel in London earlier this month. “If there was women and children first, we’d be happy. The community would be happy to take them in.”

This sentiment – a desire to help the vulnerable,but a deep distrust of the process – is remarkably common. People aren’t necessarily opposed to immigration per se,but they are furious at what they perceive as a chaotic and unfair system. They see hotels being used to house asylum seekers, often in deprived areas, and feel their own communities are being ignored. They hear stories of delays,of rejected claims,and of a system overwhelmed by bureaucracy,and they feel a sense of helplessness.

The government insists it is indeed doing all it can, pointing to the Rwanda plan and increased border patrols. But for many, these measures feel like too little, too late. The boats keep coming, and the anger keeps growing.

Out near the social housing blocks of Calais,on unused land near the hospital,more asylum seekers wait for their place on a boat. A small group of men, almost all of them from Africa, loiter on a dirt track that leads to one of the main roads, unseen by passing cars as they are hidden by tall grass and shrubs. one of them strides toward me as I walk up.”When is the food arriving?” he asks. I have turned up, unplanned, at the time a charity is due to deliver supplies.

Their desperation is heartbreaking. They have fled war, persecution, and poverty, risking everything for a chance at a better life. But their plight is also fueling the anger back home. Because for every person who makes it across the Channel, there are countless others who are left behind, waiting, hoping, and adding to the sense of crisis.The situation is complex, with no easy answers. But one thing is clear: the anger in England is real, and it is indeed growing. And if the government doesn’t find a way to address it, it risks losing the trust of the people it is indeed supposed to serve.

The Faces of the Channel Crossing

What is his name? “Tupac”, he says, borrowing from the American rapper who was killed in a drive-by shooting.He has a German girlfriend and two children,he says,and he was released from a German prison in May.what for? He is vague and makes his crime sound like a parking offense, then changes the subject.He is belligerent and burning with anger at the world. He is the migrant the protesters in England fear the most: the young man, the criminal, who might be a threat to their families.

The land here looked empty when I arrived. Now it is full of faces. At least 150 asylum seekers have emerged from the grass and shrubs to join the queue for food. All of them are young men. when the charity arrives, its leader asks me to leave.

A young boy full of hope

I see a young boy running around the men as I walk back along the dirt.He has the only happy face in this crowd, seemingly untouched by the misery of the camp. Only when I watch him run toward the road do I see four women sitting in the shade of a tree.

His mother, Asmeret, has come with her son from Eritrea. They travelled by foot and by truck across Sudan to reach Libya and find a boat to Italy. they went days without food. She reads my questions in Tigrinya, and her English is limited, but I do not need Google Translate when she describes the dangers on the journey: she points her finger, raises her thumb and makes the sound of a gun.