We Came By Sea by Horatio Clare review: 'good, old-fashioned, boots-on-the-ground reporting'

At the heart of Horatio Clare’s new book is a simple thought experiment: what if the ‘migrant crisis’ we keep hearing about isn't a crisis at all, but an opportunity? Review by Roger Cox

It's a cliché to say "this book should be a set text in schools", but really, this book should be a set text in schools. Not only does it cast fresh light on one of the most pressing issues of our age, it also forces the reader to actively question any and all information they receive and the way in which they receive it. If we want the decision-makers of tomorrow to be able to think clearly and analytically about the world around them - and god knows, thanks to the anything-goes nature of cyberspace our children and grandchildren will be forced to slice their way through far more disinformation and nonsense than any generation before them in order to arrive at some vague approximation of the truth - then this is exactly the kind of text they should be sharpening the blades of their minds on.

Migrants, picked up at sea attempting to cross the English Channel, are helped ashore from an Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) lifeboat, at Dungeness on the southeast coast of England, on December 9, 2022 | AFP via Getty Images

As its title suggests, We Came By Sea is a book about the many thousands of migrants who attempt what are officially known as "irregular border crossings" from France to England each year, using small boats to cross the English Channel, and at its core is a thought experiment which is both simple and revolutionary. What if, author and journalist Horatio Clare asks, the "migrant crisis" we keep hearing about in the media isn't really a crisis at all? What if we only think of it as a crisis because of the way the story has been framed? What if, in fact, we are being presented with a migrant opportunity?

Of course, given the all-pervasive way in which the "Britain's lost control of its borders" story has been presented to us over a period of many years, this idea will seem jarring to many people, and Clare accepts as much. Nevertheless, he sets out to flip the prevailing narrative on its head, and he does so via good, old-fashioned, boots-on-the-ground reporting.

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He begins by chatting to a security guard outside Tug Haven in Dover, where migrants are escorted off the rescue vessels that pick them up. "I came down here to see if these people are being treated properly," the guard says. "And they are. Really well. We can be proud - we're looking after them." This makes Clare wonder: "Where have you read 'Dover proudly welcomes refugees?'" He speaks to an RNLI lifeboat coxswain whose job often involves rescuing migrants from the sea and bringing them safely ashore. "I wish I could talk openly," he says, but "I've seen the faces of people ashore who wish you weren't doing what you're doing." Clare reflects that "the last time I wrote about a place when I could name nobody, for their own sake, was in Turkmenistan, an insane dictatorship."

As he continues to walk around Dover, Clare finds "everyone seems happy to speak" but "no one wants to be named." However, everything he hears suggests that "Dover is not, as sections of the media have it, 'overwhelmed by migrants' or 'up in arms'... On the contrary, Dover is sympathetic, understanding and doing everything it can to help the people in the boats." Clare also visits "the newsman" - a self-employed reporter and photographer who makes his living selling content about small boat crossings to the press. Of the newsman's output, Claire writes: "The money, he has found, is in demonising 'migrants' and slanting his stories to generate fear and hostility towards them - and so he does."

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Next, Clare travels across the Channel to Calais, where he accompanies a charity worker called Gess on her rounds of the squalid camps where migrants wait while trying to cross over to Britain. Apart from the almost superhuman dedication of Gess and those who work with her when it comes to improving the lot of those who have lost almost everything, Clare's most pertinent finding in this section of the book has to do with the attitudes of the migrants he meets concerning their reasons for wanting to come to the UK. He writes: "Britain is not racist, they tell me. It is a fair country, a good country. They know people there who tell them it is better."

There is also a telling scene in which Clare interviews a Sudanese web designer with a Masters in IT and good English. His primary reason for wanting to live in the UK, he says, is language. "To start in a new country with nothing is impossible if you don't have the language." This causes Claire to reflect that "Across the sea, a British chancellor is relying on a surge of migrant labour to fill 1.2 million job vacancies. 'Only higher-than-expected immigration adds materially to prospects for potential output growth over the coming five years,' according to the Office for Budget Responsibility... You read that and re-read it and the dissonance is dizzying... [but] no British politician will come here to explain to the IT graduate that he is the wrong kind of solution to our problems."

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Would We Came By Sea have made its argument more effectively if Claire had managed to keep his own views and emotions out of the text to a greater extent? Perhaps. Any future leaders reading this book in Modern Studies classes a few years from now might well observe that he often uses emotive language and rhetorical flourishes to get his points across, much as those on the other side of the argument choose their words very carefully in order to make theirs. There are also instances where the distinction between refugees and economic migrants seems to have been left deliberately vague: surely comparing the welcome received by Ukrainian refugees to the UK in 2022 with more mixed attitudes to those crossing the Channel in small boats is a little unfair on the British public, as it fails to take into account the fact that at least some of those in the boats will be primarily looking for work, as opposed to fleeing the brutal, murderous army of an invading superpower.

Still, for all that some of the complexities may have been glossed over, Clare’s broader point is very much worth making: that, as a nation, we have become conditioned to view this issue in only one way, and if we could only see it differently then perhaps we could begin to see ourselves differently too, even take pride again in who we are.

You could, he writes, see the boats crossing the English Channel "as the press and politicians do, and as the British people are being taught to see it, as a crisis, a disaster, an intractable knot of problems with no clear solutions. Or you could see it as one of the greatest search and rescue success stories of all time. Imagine those headlines: 'Dover saves another 60 from the sea. Record-breaking Day of Rescues' ... Would we feel differently about this country, about the people in small boats, and about ourselves, if we were reading this every day? And the fact is, it is true. This is what we are doing. This is us."

We Came by Sea: Stories of a Greater Britain, by Horatio Clare, Little Toller Books, £20

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