The security guard looks as though he is crying as the rain runs down his glasses but his voice is steady and warm.

We are behind Lord Warden House, a shabby ghost of old England, white as a whale in the darkness, haunting Dover’s Western Docks. Once a grand hotel, a favorite of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Napoleon III, its shell now hosts the offices of freight firms. Visitors come for its parking spaces and the tents on the quay behind it. This is Tug Haven, where the people from the small boats are escorted off their rescue vessels. On the ramp up to the processing tents is where the photographers catch them. Thousands of people from across the sea, anonymous figures with their dark hair and orange life jackets, some wrapped in blankets, some carrying children, some children themselves, begin their new lives here. This facility will be attacked with petrol bombs, and the screening will be moved to Western Jet Foil nearby, but for now this is Britain’s threshold.

Once they have been processed in the tents, people from the small boats are driven to a second fenced and guarded area where they await further processing, or just wait, until they are directed to a coach and driven up the hill and over the chalk cliffs to an England of motorways, outskirts, reception centers and hotels.

Between the processing tents and the holding area, the security guard is keeping an eye on a potential weirdo in a cagoule, wet jeans and soaking shoes, shivering at him. I am here in Dover because what is happening on the French coast and in the Channel, and in this town and behind these fences has become an obsession – for the press, for the politicians, for the people of Britain and for me. I have come here to try to understand it.

The Channel looked surly and thuggish at noon, the sea a spiteful yellow-grey under fog. Through the short dusk and into nightfall the wind has been bitter and inconstant from the south- west, spitting squalls of mist and rain. Surely, I think, nobody in a dinghy has tried to cross the Channel today. I hunch in my jacket, feeling awkward with the guard’s eyes on me.

“Good evening!”

He looks uncertain. “Can I help you”? he says. He is quite an elderly man.

“I’m writing about Dover,” I say. “What do you think about the people in the small boats?”

And that is all it takes. As rain runs down his specs, the security guard speaks softly. He talks as though he has been waiting to tell someone this: “I’m from Dover,” he says. “Lived here thirty years. Retired. I came down here to see if these people are being treated properly. And they are. Really well. We can be proud – we’re looking after them. We got an alert this morning – they cooked two hundred sausages and then we had to eat most of them because it was a false alarm.”

“There was a twenty-six-year-old girl with a three-month-old baby on a night like this, January 4th. That really upset me. These people need help. And look at these fences! Look at the size of them. They’re not going away – the world’s on the move and politicians are not telling people the truth. I shouldn’t be talking to you really.”

After a short while we say goodbye and I move away, bend over my notebook in the gloom and write down what he said, and then I stand in the rain, amazed. I have only been here half a day and already the story that I thought I knew, the one everyone knows, has collapsed.

On the slipway earlier I met a jet-ski team from Border Force who told me they were trained and willing to do pushbacks out at sea. I was surprised, because according to the news and the narrative of this crisis, Border Force are preparing to go on strike rather than have their members risk prosecution for sinking dinghies. Ramming an overloaded inflatable crammed with people, which is what a “pushback” means, could amount to attempted murder, so the union which represents Border Force is angrily opposed to it. But the jet-ski men I spoke to on the slipway are excited at the prospect. Some of them could not wait to get ramming.

“We’ve practiced it!” one said. “We know it works!”

“But what about the union?” I asked.

“We’re not members of that union.”

“How do you feel about doing pushbacks?”

“I was in the Falklands,” said a senior member of the team. “The mission then was ‘Get them off there!’ If the mission now is “Push them back,” this team won’t have a problem with it.”

To this frank, stocky man with his Welsh accent and straight back, Argentinian soldiers had become people in small boats. They are them.

When I told them I was a writer they said they were not bothered about speaking to me, albeit anonymously. “No one has been down here to ask us what we think,” said the Welshman with a shrug. We talked about their jet skis, and I mentioned volunteering on lifeboats when I was young.

“You should sign up!” the team leader said. “You can find the application on the Home Office website. There’s lots of jobs!”

They also said they sometimes turned their transponders off when they were out at sea. With the Automated Identification System disabled, they could not be tracked.

“We switch it off when we’re doing something covert,” said the youngest and most excitable. He refused to elaborate on that. Perhaps it was a fantasy. On the French shore, a young man dreams himself on the other side, safe in Britain. On the English side, a young man dreams he is some sort of commando, repelling Britain’s foes mid-Channel. How many dreams soar over the Channel tonight, over this black and sloshing sea?

In London, politicians dream of resolving the crisis and news editors dream of milking it. Behind mansion gates, the owners of private outsourcing firms dream of ever bigger hotel- accommodation contracts and higher transport and custody profits (their dreams are real). Across the sea, smugglers dream of euros, sacks and bags and cases full of euros (their dreams are real, too). And across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, across the Earth, countless closed eyes have imaginary Englands flickering behind them tonight, Englands like Edwardian Lord Wardens in Edwardian sun, with sea views and tall windows. And here in Dover, the security guard stands in the rain beside the ghost of a once-upon-a-time hotel.

About this security guard: unless he is the only local person who thinks this way, what he has just told me is the whole story turning upside down. Retired Dovorians coming down here, taking outsourced jobs, donning the luminous uniform of Stand-Back and Do-What-You’re-Told in order to make sure the people in the boats are treated properly?

Who knew he would say that? Where on earth is this side of the story? Where is this truth in all the millions of predictable and repeated words spouted about “migrants in small boats”?

The politicians are not telling people the truth, he said. If his is not a lone voice, if this is not a marginal, uncommon feeling, then it is not just the politicians who are misrepresenting what is happening here. The media are not telling people the truth, either. Where have you read Dover proudly welcomes refugees? And if the media are not reporting what is actually happening, then the pundits do not know what they are talking about, and the interviewers are not asking the right people the right questions, or if they are, they are just reporting the same old story in the same old way.

It is not clear who is leading whom. Are the politicians simply reacting to the story the media is telling? If so, why are the media telling it this way? Because we look for crisis, for drama, for outrage, and manufacture it where we do not find it? Is it journalism’s fault? If we are telling a skewed, unbalanced story, then the “debate” so-called – the talk in the press, online, on social media and in our homes, pubs and workplaces – is awry. If this quiet, greying man is representative of how Dover really feels, what about the rest of Britain? Suppose this desire to help and protect and to take pride in helping is not limited to Dover. We can be proud, he said. But we are not proud.

Of course I am cautious. It might just be one man who thinks this way. And I am angry, too, because my hunch is that he is not alone, and if he is not then Britain is being taken for a fool.

We can be proud. We’re looking after them.

Bloody hell.

I wish I could thank that security guard now, on behalf of millions of us who wish to be proud of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I did ask his name.

“I wish I could tell you,” he said.

A dazzling winter daybreak blushes the white cliffs pink. Ferries sail across the sun’s glare. They are not beautiful ships but they still carry something of the spirit of adventure, of foreign travel and the Continent, this lovely day. Flocks of herring gulls scream and spin over the harbor.

“We call it the bird ballet,” says a sharp-eyed lady, setting off for a freezing swim with her friend, both in wetsuits, hats and gloves. Dover looks almost magnificent this morning. As hotchpotch as its pebbles, as enduring as its castle, and run- down behind its seafront, it could be an emblem of Britain. During the Second World War this was the capital of ‘hellfire corner’. The whole hinterland of east Kent was bombed, strafed and shelled. Monuments along Marine Parade recall the Dover Patrol, small armed boats, often attacked from the air, which rescued sailors and airmen from the sea. There are monuments and plaques to the Merchant Navy, to the soldiers and seafarers and the people of Dover who found themselves in the firing line and fought back. Something of that assertion and that defiance lingers in the fortifications, in the cliffs and in the ramshackle grandeur of the waking town. The gulls could almost be yodeling Rule Britannia, drunk on daybreak. You long to set sail from Dover on a day like this. You long to set out on a lifeboat, in fact.

I have worked with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution in the years since I crewed its boats. The charity is wonderfully open, helpful and enthusiastic, normally. It is still helpful and responsive, but recently its tone has changed.

“We appreciate the support and what you are doing but no, we can’t take you out on a boat and we can’t comment directly. Our CEO has put out a statement. You can find it on our site,” says a spokeswoman over the phone.

Not long ago the politician Nigel Farage came down to Dover Beach to be filmed accusing the RNLI of “acting like a taxi service for migrants.” This was met with the outrage he hoped for – outrage from people alarmed by accounts in the press of “fleets” of “migrants,” outrage from racist trolls, and outrage from those who were so appalled by Farage that they responded by sending donations to the RNLI. The charity recorded its best-ever fundraising year.

Coming in from the sea on a lifeboat with people saved from the Channel and their rescuers would be a vivid way to tell this story, I suggest to the spokeswoman.

“Impossible,” she says, and explains that the RNLI is trying to stay out of the politics of the situation, which means saying nothing to the press and telling their volunteers not to talk. “And in any case,” the spokeswoman adds, “they are recovering so many people they do not have space for a writer on the deck. Sometimes we’re so busy we don’t even count them.” I make a note not to use her name in anything I write, lest I expose her to abuse. It seems incredible in a free and democratic country that to report the name of someone working for a voluntary emergency service is to put that person and the service at risk.

Down at the Dover Lifeboat Station, the walls are covered with plaques recording RNLI rescues dating back to 1837. There is a telling blank where the recent records of achievement should be. Crew come and go, walking swiftly, heads down. During my time as a RNLI volunteer, we strode or sprinted down to our station with such pride and excitement. Volunteer crews have always felt this way. Even when the weather is abominable and you are scared of the conditions you are about to face, you are beyond proud to be with the boat, honored to be trusted by the others on the crew. Crews are under no obligation to launch; the RNLI is independent of the state and the Coastguard. When coastguards identify a vessel or a person in danger they contact the RNLI, give the position of the casualty, as far as they know it, with whatever facts they have, and request a rescue.

Come the gales, come the monstrous, murderous seas. For the sake of strangers in peril, volunteers leave safety and go into it. Few people who are not professional sailors will experience the fury of the sea. But that terrifying power is what the boats are designed for and the crews trained.

On the RNLI’s memorial in Poole to men and women who have died attempting rescues there are over six hundred names inscribed. The last lifeboat lost at sea was the Solomon Browne, which launched under the command of Trevelyan Richards from Penlee Lifeboat Station, Cornwall, on December 19, 1981. A small bulk carrier with a crew of five had suffered engine failure in a hurricane – Force twelve on the Beaufort Scale, the winds up to ninety knots, 100 miles an hour, and waves up to sixty feet high: eighteen meters. I have been on ships in severe gales and frightening swells, but I struggle to picture waves the size of six-story buildings. The little ship was being driven towards the cliffs. There was no doubt what was going to happen to her. It defies belief that people would put to sea in such conditions, but the crew of the Solomon Browne set out. Trevelyan Richards refused to take one person, the son of another of his crew, judging the risk too severe to take two members of the same family. The Solomon Browne managed to get four casualties off the doomed ship in a second pass, the waves so big that during its first attempt they dumped the entire lifeboat on top of the stricken vessel. Both were destroyed and all souls lost. The pilot of a rescue helicopter, helpless to assist, saw what happened. He wrote:

The greatest act of courage that I have ever seen, and am ever likely to see, was the courage and dedication shown by the Penlee [crew] when it maneuvered back alongside the casualty in over sixty-foot breakers and rescued four people shortly after the Penlee had been bashed on top of the casualty’s hatch covers. They were truly the bravest eight men I’ve ever seen.

These are the people and this is the organization that Farage and his followers bait and troll. And this is why being on the crew of the Dover lifeboat, until now, was to be counted among the best of your community, someone prepared to risk injury and death to stand for those in mortal danger. Dover Lifeboat Station has just taken on thirteen new volunteers and they are still recruiting. But I watch the Dover crews now, walking to their shifts with their heads down, their eyes averted.

I approach a coxswain, a man who looks phlegmatically prepared for a passerby’s comments. “It must be a strange time to be you,” I say, and tell him what I am doing.

“I wish I could talk openly,” he murmurs. “It’s incredibly rewarding to help people, of course. In Dover we’re always the front line. Wars, refugees, migrants – that’s what it is here. And I’ve seen the faces of people ashore who wish you weren’t doing what you’re doing.”

Being unable to speak freely frustrates him. The last time I wrote about a place when I could name nobody, for their own sake, was in Turkmenistan, an insane dictatorship floating on hydrocarbons and despotism. And this is Dover.

For days I walk back and forth, stopping people, asking questions, seeking glimpses into the thoughts of strangers. Everyone seems happy to speak, and no one wants to be named. “What do you think about the small boats from France?” I ask. “We never see them,” smiles a retired teacher walking her dog.

We talk a little and she says she loves living here. “It’s all kept very quiet,” she says.

It is, too. You have to take circuitous routes even to glimpse the lifeboats and Border Force boats bringing people into Tug Haven. And everything after that takes place out of sight, unless you stand where I met the security guard last night, where you can just about glimpse people being escorted to unmarked buses.

“You can’t have everyone coming in,” says a local man collecting pebbles that his wife likes to paint. “But we’d do the same, wouldn’t we?”

He tells me his daughter-in-law works for an organization that helps asylum seekers.

“When they tell her they want to take their own lives, that takes a toll on her,” he says.

“It’s not the best situation,” says a Dovorian in his twenties, walking a Labrador puppy. “But we’d do the same.”

His companion, also local, agrees. “We would do the same. I feel sorry for them,” she adds. “My mum’s got a job with Border Force.” I find a Border Force agent hauling on his dry suit in a harbor car park. This man’s team recover the smugglers’ dinghies which would otherwise be abandoned at sea after rescues.

“You can’t identify me,” he says, urgently, when I tell him I am a journalist.

“I promise I won’t.”

“We’re the RAC,” he grins. “We do the long slow tow.”

When he looks at the people in the small boats he sees irrationality, he tells me, more than anything else.

“It feels mad,” he mutters, his expression suddenly pained. “They put themselves in danger. If you put your wife and children on one of those dinghies at sea, you’d be charged.”

“Would you do pushbacks?” I ask.

“No! Can you imagine? Doing that to a flimsy boat at sea? It turns over, people drown.”

“But I met a team of Border Force with jet skis yesterday who seemed quite keen to do it.”

“We’re the local office,” he sighs. “They’re national. We should be pushing passports. But instead…”

And with a shrug he sets off to search, rescue, and tow.

Everything I can see and everything these people are telling me fits with what the first security guard said. Dover is not, as sections of the media have it, “overwhelmed by migrants” or “up in arms” or feeling frightened or threatened at the small boat crossings. On the contrary, Dover is sympathetic, understanding and doing everything it can to help the people in the boats.

I go back to Tug Haven, back to the fences and the uniforms, where a guard in luminous high vis, blocking the entrance to the processing tents, turns out to be another retired local man. He says that a group of people have just been brought ashore.

“They’re safe now!” he smiles. He looks really happy. “There are very young children with them. They’re being looked after. I come down from Ramsgate for a twelve-hour shift – and you’re doing your bit, aren’t you? You want to see they’re alright. Because they must be desperate, mustn’t they?”

I suggest that “Doing your bit,” is the language of the Second World War, of heroic national effort.

“Yes it is!” he says, as proud as a grandfather.

“May I ask who you work for?”

“I can’t tell you that,” he says.

It does not take much to find out. His employers are Mitie Care and Custody. Running processing and holding centers has boosted Mitie’s “Care and Custody” revenue to £60 million, a £10 million increase the company ascribes to “small boat arrivals on the South Coast.”

Mitie Group’s overall revenue is up 103 percent to £1.9 billion. By the end of March 2024 this will have ballooned to £4.5 billion, with the “Care and Custody” division raking in a rapid fortune of £217 million, made from detention, removals, processing and transport at some of Britain’s most notorious sites, including the infamous Manston Processing Centre.

Migration is not normally framed as a blessing to business, but it is. I watch jolly employees of HATS (a patient transport company), Interforce (a security company) and Loyalty Connections (a Kentish coach company), alongside police, Home Office and privately contracted medical staff all going about their work, in and out of Tug Haven. The general impression is an air of bustle these docks cannot have known since the fishing industry died. Shouts of laughter and good-humored greetings are constant; they were last night, too, when it was cold and raining. The sense of common purpose, of meaningful endeavor, of “doing your bit” is palpable. Even standing around in your high vis, guarding in the cold and wet on minimum wage seems to make your spirits lighter and your smile freer when you feel you are helping the destitute and detained.

Everything you think you know about Dover and the “migrant crisis” is wrong, I think, watching. But the fear it provokes is real. The CEO of a refugee charity pleads with me when I call: “Just call me a spokesperson?” A lady walking her dog also requests anonymity, though she waives the dog’s right: his name is Max.

Even the armed forces are scared to speak.

I contact the Royal Navy. In an effort to be seen to be doing something, to appease the right-wing press and its constituencies, presumably, the government has announced that the Navy will take overall control of events in the Channel. The Navy, the word comes back, will absolutely not speak about the situation or take me to sea. It is unclear what they are supposed to do about the dinghies, anyway. They could mount rescues with their tenders, but warships are primarily designed to blast boats and people into the deep, not pull them out of it. The Navy has no formal relationship with the RNLI, which will continue to work with the coastguard.

Another golden morning turns into a sparkling winter day, the sun high, the air ringing with light. From the top of Shakespeare Cliff, to the south-west of the town, you can see the whole story laid out below you on the sea. Here are the ferries, the castle and cliffs. The sky is Battle-of-Britain-blue. It even buzzes with a Merlin engine as someone flies over in the two-seater White Cliffs Spitfire Experience. There is Dover lifeboat, launched on exercise. They are working up the new crew today, coordinating with a rescue helicopter which hovers low above the sea. We did that once, taking turns to maneuver our boat through the aircraft’s down-draft of whipped spray to be winched up and down. It must be an unforgettable day for the fresh volunteers.

Over to the east is the low line of the French coast, from where the small boats set out, aiming for the United Kingdom border, mid-Channel. Although France retrieved over a thousand people from its waters last year, the French authorities have found it is difficult and dangerous to interdict the dinghies. They are not deterred by warships or patrol boats. Once the dinghies are at sea, the French vessels cannot stop them or turn them around without the risk of sinking them. Last week one ignored a French warship, refusing to stop until Dover lifeboat pointed its searchlight at a Union Jack on the superstructure of a Border Force vessel, showing the frontier had been crossed. Another dinghy got into difficulty off Berck-sur-Mer. A Sudanese man in his twenties died.

The impotence of the French authorities, once the boats are launched from the beaches, leads to accusations in the British press that France is merely escorting the small boats out of its waters. It is hard to see what else France can do. If the dinghies get into trouble, the French can rescue them. Otherwise they stand off, keeping a safe distance until the boats reach British territory.

As they putter across the sea, the dinghies are tracked by Dover Coastguard, liaising with French authorities at Cap Gris-Nez. Helicopters, drones and spotter planes use thermal imaging to count people aboard.

The British government has given a billion-pound contract to a Portuguese company to run maritime surveillance drones in the Channel. Their cameras are able to film the faces of the people, some picked on the beach and some drawn at random from each dinghy’s passengers, some of whom have ended up steering the boats. These people can now be prosecuted for trafficking, though they are surely not the traffickers. Sometimes the trafficker will offer a reduced fee to those who will steer the boats. The Coastguard designates each dinghy a “radar target,” and gives its position to search and rescue vessels which bring the people in them to Dover Western Docks.

The astounding thing is how successful this semi-joint operation by France and Britain has proved to be. In perilously unfit boats, helmed by men with no experience, tens of thousands of people in substandard or no life jackets, many of whom cannot swim, have survived a notorious stretch of sea and one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world to be recovered and landed safely in England. There have been disasters, but they speak more harshly of the British government, which has been cutting back funding to the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, and thereby reducing the numbers of skilled coastguards, than they do of the people trying to coordinate and effect the rescues.

The volume of boats crossing the Channel in the days running up to the tragedy back in November 2021 overwhelmed the understaffed Dover control room. On November 20 just three operatives tried to deal with 110 reports of small boats. On November 24, staff seem to have downgraded emergency calls, apparently out of desperation, in a kind of fingers- crossed hope that the number of rescue vessels and the number of dinghies at sea would somehow match up. There were just two people on operational duty that night. One of them was a trainee. The RNLI were not tasked to attend the incident. The French and British coast guards told people in the stricken dinghy who were begging for their lives that they were in the other country’s waters. At least thirty-one people drowned, all of whom could and should have been saved. Robert Jenrick, Immigration Minister, made a comment on the disaster which surprised MPs across Parliament: “We will not be able to secure the passage of everyone who chooses to get in an unsafe dinghy,” he said. The youngest victim was Hasti Rzgar Hussein. She was seven years old.

And yet, given the sheer numbers of people who have been rescued from this sea, there has been no operation like it since the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkerque in 1940.

You could see it, 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 Sixty from the Sea. Record-Breaking Day of Rescues. Combined Operation Saves 45,000 This Year.

Would we feel differently about this country, about the people in the 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.

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From Horatio Clare, We Came by Sea: Stories of a Greater Britain (Little Toller Book, 2025).