UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has issued a stark warning that Britain is losing control over its borders amid a sharp rise in illegal immigration – a failure she says is eroding public trust in government institutions and the credibility of the state itself. Her remarks, revealed in excerpts from a planned address at a London summit with Balkan interior ministers on October 15, signal an intensifying political storm over the country’s migration crisis, which shows no sign of abating.

Mahmood’s admission that “the public rightly expect that their government will be able to determine who enters their country and who must leave” reflects a rare acknowledgment by a senior Labour cabinet official that the UK’s border management system has fallen into disarray. In her prepared statement, Mahmood concedes that “today, in this country, that is not the case.” Such candid language marks a departure from the guarded rhetoric often used by British ministers on the issue of migration.

“The failure to bring order to our borders is eroding trust not just in us as political leaders, but in the credibility of the state itself,” she warns in her speech. For many Britons, the statement confirms what has long been evident – that the government’s efforts to stem the tide of illegal immigration have failed, leaving the border system overwhelmed and public confidence shattered.

Official government figures illustrate the scale of the problem. In the year ending June 2025, Britain recorded 49,000 irregular arrivals – a 27% increase from the same period the previous year. Small-boat crossings across the English Channel accounted for a staggering 88% of those entries, marking a 38% year-on-year rise. Despite successive........

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