Can we broaden it out from the United Kingdom across the whole of Europe? What is the picture to be seen there? Good morning.

Good morning.

The picture is quite interesting because unauthorised border crossings into the EU are also down, and they're down by about the same percentage that channel crossings are to the UK, about 40% so far in 2026.

And, you know, that could be due to EU asylum policy.

They've tightened that up.

And, of course, also these really important financial deals between the EU and Tunisia, where roughly 100 million euros is earmarked for border management and their coast guard and they're doing pullbacks.

And also a similar deal between Italy and Libya's coast guard.

So what do we make of the arguments, the position that we hear from the UK government about the numbers then, Doctor?

And there's another problem

Suarez is a Brazilian who was sent by the cartels to track down a shipment of coke that had landed in the UK but seemed to have gone missing.

They weren't sure where it was, and they were getting somewhat concerned.

So he arrives in the UK and his contact was Kevin Hanley, but Kevin Hanley in the meantime, has been arrested

It's probably the one time during the whole duration of the case that Brian Wright had to sort of rear his head and put himself at risk

Ultimately, in order to locate these drugs and then check that they are being distributed properly, Suarez has to link up with the main man in the organization, which is Brian Wright, and that's a key moment in the investigation because that directly links through a personal meeting, a figure from the cartels with Brian Wright himself rather than one of his underlings, such as Hanley

That's Peter Walsh, author of Drug War: The Secret History.

You can't rely on too many people when you run a drug trafficking organization.

You need a small, tightly knit group of people that you can absolutely rely on.

And if you find someone like that, they're gold for your operation, and it seems that Brian Wright found somebody like that in Kevin Hanley.

Peter Walsh, author of Drug War.

It obviously does have addictive qualities, and this is where it becomes a danger to the user in that it can lead you down a path where you're constantly having to pay money to feed your addiction.

And people get into sort of terrible trouble of debt and are unable to handle their lives.

Peter Walsh is the author of Drug War: The Secret History of the UK Drug Trade.

Not particularly physically prepossessing, both sort of below average height, fairly sort of clean cut, chiseled features.

Got involved in the drugs trade quite early, like a lot of young men would have done in Colombia at that time.

But clearly had an adventurous streak and also a very violent streak, and established themselves ultimately in the port city called Barranquilla, which was very important for the distribution of cocaine.

And one of the twins in particular, Victor, sort of held sway there.

He was a fixture on the nightlife of that city.

[upbeat music] Through links to the horse racing world and old criminal ties, he had buyers ready to take whatever he could bring in.

He was very closely linked to a big crime family in North London, the Adams family, and he had longstanding underworld contacts to a lot of other people around the country as well.

Peter Walsh is the author of Drug War: The Secret History.

Heroin had been the drug scare of the '80s.

It had caused some terrible problems in cities like Liverpool and Glasgow and elsewhere.

But by the '90s, it was becoming apparent that cocaine was now ubiquitous and was the social drug of choice of a large number of particularly young British people every weekend.

Together, they controlled almost all of the world's cocaine.

Up until the early to mid-'90s when there was a concerted effort by the Colombian authorities and the DEA in America to take them down, and they succeeded initially in killing Escobar and taking out some of the other top leaders of Medellin and then of also effectively decapitating the Cali cartel.

How do you feel about whether or not language is the issue here?

Well, it's certainly central.

I mean, in the UK context, with which I'm most familiar, deterrence has really... become one of the consistent themes across successive governments over many years in UK asylum policy.

And it's an interesting language because the language of deterrence, it has a clear challenge to be addressed.

That's an authorised arrival.

So that's the problem to be solved.

It does imply that it's the government who is best placed to solve that issue.

I mean, do you have a view about who's shaping that conversation and why it matters?

Would it appear, and I appreciate we're some distance unless you're joining me from the Kent coast, is it working? Good morning.

good morning uh thank you very much for having me uh short-term fluctuations to zero over periods of about a week they are quite common um but you know looking at the weather over the past week in the channel there were some breezier days with elevated wave heights that may have made smugglers think twice but i think overall it does feel like a corner is being turned And that's because numbers are not only down to this point on last year and quite substantially, by the way, 12,500 so far this year, 24,000 at this point last year.

So they're down almost half.

But remember, last year was an outlier and that the numbers were front loaded.

So that's why we looked at other years and we see also now to this point numbers are down on 24, on 2023, on 2022.

So it looks like the numbers are indeed coming down.

The big question, of course, is why.

And you're saying this is return deals, is it, with Tunisia? How do they work, Doctor?

How is it taking so long?

Yeah, it seems that there is a subcategory of people that seem to be nigh on impossible to remove.

Uh, and I, I think at the heart of it is countries taking back their own citizens.

And there are a number of countries where successive governments have found it really hard to return people to, and part of that's because we don't have the kinds of arrangements that would facilitate that.

For example, we don't have a functioning returns agreement with the Taliban, so removals to Afghanistan are, are very difficult and very few.

The same applies to other countries like Iran, like Iraq, Turkey, Bangladesh.

So there are these real challenges, and they're partly diplomatic challenges in actually removing people back to their countries of origin.

Do you sense that there has at least been positive movement with the relatively new administration, Doctor?

Well, what's new in these proposals?

proposals?... uh, the end of permanent residence for refugees.

So as things stand now, if you get refugee status in the UK, in all likelihood, you will remain permanently.

You get five years permission to stay, after which you can apply free for permanent residence, known as indefinite leave to remain.

Uh, that will be out the window following, uh, the implementation of these proposals, instead replaced with a temporary permission lasting two and a half years, at which point the government will regularly review the case of the individual every two and a half years, and if it's safe to return them to the country from which they fled, the government will try to effect a removal.

We know this is inspired by the Danish policy, and in some senses is actually more restrictive.

Denmark has an eight-year route to settlement for refugees.

Would they be right to be?