After the UK’s left-wing government stated that using the armed forces to secure the southern border against waves of illegal migrants is “not the best use of the military”, Reform UK Member of Parliament Lee Anderson pointed out that this is actually precisely why countries have armed forces.
The primary purpose of a military is to defend the borders of a nation, and this is a job they can be good at, Reform UK’s Member of Parliament Lee Anderson told Breitbart News after a spokesman for the British government, astonishingly, said it isn’t a good use of troops.
The UK Labour government was forced to go on the defensive this week after U.S. President Donald Trump, offering some advice from his own experience in ending a migrant crisis on his nation’s southern border, told Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to get on with it and deploy the military.
Warning Sir Keir of the damage uncontrolled mass migration does if left to run wild, and making implicit that it is easier to stop migrants coming in than removing them once they’ve arrived, President Trump said: “I think your situation is very similar, you have people coming in. And I told the Prime Minister I would stop it, it doesn’t matter if you call out the military, it doesn’t matter which means you use.”
He continued: “… we’re now actually removing a lot of people who came into our country, it’s a very hard chore. We were given a bad hand. Millions of people came in… and we are removing them, and I feel very strongly about it.”
While the UK’s Labour government makes a lot of noise about border control, it is obviously not instinctively anti-mass migration in any meaningful way, and it has spent the time since President Trump’s remarks trying to downplay them. Prime Minister Starmer, who was standing beside Trump at the time, made the instant retort that there is “no silver bullet”, despite other countries like Australia having seemingly proved that actually there is.
Starmer’s Business Minister, Peter Kyle, told Sky News that although the military could be called upon if needed, deploying it was actually pointless because Border Force –the Home Office organisation that picks up boat migrants from the middle of the English Channel and carries them to British shores — already exists. What will actually be effective, Kyle said, was Sir Keir Starmer’s returns agreement, which managed to only return one migrant to France on Thursday.
Repeatedly pressed on the question, Kyle became visibly agitated and eventually conceded that “there is nothing that is off the table”. Nevertheless, he said: “We want the military to be out there defending our country as they are doing day in, day out, and keeping us safe… and we want a migration system that is functional in its own right. It is not the best use of the military having them there, doing things that actually we should have other parts of government that are there to solve those challenges”.
Lee Anderson MP, a former longtime Labour member of the socially conservative wing of the party, who went on something of a political anabasis in the post-Brexit era and defected to Farage’s faction in 2024. Responding in his trademark no-nonsense style to Kyle’s comments, Mr Anderson told Breitbart News that far from being wasted on border control, that’s actually what the military is for.
He said: “Our armed forces exist for the sole purpose of defending our borders, protecting our citizens, and preventing invasion.
“They deployed them in America, and the illegal crossings have come to a full stop. Reform has promised to deport those who are here illegally and stop the continued invasion of our shores.
“If we need the help of the military, we will have it.”
It isn’t as if using the military to protect Britain’s borders is particularly controversial. As reported this year, an overwhelming majority of Britons, 69 per cent, support the notion of the government tasking the Royal Navy to shut the English Channel to human trafficker boats. Just 18 per cent said they were opposed to performing border control in this way.
A majority said they believed migrants are being drawn to the UK by the nation’s generous welfare system, and half said migrants see the UK as a soft touch. Just 37 said they think migrants are actually fleeing conflict when they come to Britain.
The policy is one advocated by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, as expressed by Anderson. As reported in July:
The Reform leader has long advocated for a similar approach to that of former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s Operation Sovereign Borders, which all but eliminated illegal migration by turning the boats back and holding alleged asylum seekers in third-party countries rather than allowing them on Australian shores to claim asylum.
The current British policy allows for almost all illegal boat migrants — the vast majority of whom are military age males — to immediately claim asylum, after which they are put up at taxpayer expense in hotels across the country.
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