If the government won’t stop the boats, the protesters will. That’s the message that has been sent by another demonstration, in another south-coast town, as another migrant dinghy was sailing its way into British waters.

Last night, in Hampshire, hundreds gathered outside a marina in Gosport in anticipation of another boat-load of illegal migrants arriving uninvited on its shores. Word had got out that the boat, which set off from Normandy on Monday, was bound for the Portsmouth area.

The authorities, usually a byword for uselessness, leapt into action. The boat was intercepted. Police were mobilised. The local MP was told a landing in Gosport was ‘increasingly likely’. A motorcade of police vehicles was filmed escorting coaches to the town, to scoop up the migrants and take them to processing centres.

But the protesters leapt into action, too. Locals and activists descended on the marina. Danny Tommo, leader of right-wing direct-action group Patriot Platform, sailed out into the Channel to film the dinghy’s voyage, before sending his balaclava-clad men to Gosport.

Eventually, the migrants were redirected to Dover, traditional landing spot of the small boats, thus never setting foot in Gosport and avoiding a frosty reception. But that doesn’t mean this is the end of the matter. After an almost identical flare-up in Portsmouth earlier this month, these spontaneous protests pose a serious challenge to a British state that has hitherto been facilitating illegal migration out of sight of the public.

Facilitate is the word. For what has been taking place across the English Channel is not ‘asylum seeking’ in any meaningful sense. Even Rory Stewart is now saying that anyone who is fleeing, for all intents and purposes, France has no real right to claim asylum in Britain. This is a funnel for illegal migration – and everyone knows it.

The government can bang on about its legal obligations all it likes – to aid vessels in distress, to process those who claim asylum here, to house those who have made a claim. What the public sees is illegal migrants being escorted into our waters, landed on our soil and put up at our expense. Because beyond the legal niceties of the situation, that is precisely what is happening here.

The conspiracy of silence around this issue has now come crashing down. A collection of activists, citizen journalists and populist politicians have put the ‘asylum’ issue firmly in the spotlight – spawning a bottom-up resistance movement against illegal migration that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago.

All of this is set against a government that struggles to see there is a problem here at all, and is resigned to managing the inflow in a slightly cheaper, more efficient and more equitable fashion. Labour responded to the migrant-hotel protests of last summer by shuffling more migrants into HMOs and military bases, only for this to spark the fury of locals and flash-mob demonstrations, too. Even the posh village of Piddington has been in revolt against plans to stick 1,250 migrants on a nearby barracks, dwarfing the local population by four-to-one.

Some will take issue with the tactics of some of the protests, and the characters spoiling to lead them. Danny Tommo, an acolyte of Tommy Robinson, has an attempted kidnapping conviction from his particularly misspent youth. But there is clearly an appetite for these more assertive – though explicitly non-violent – forms of protest that these activist-influencers are tapping into.

Is this really such a shock? Brits voted to take back control of migration, only for legal and illegal migration to soar. They saw story after story of so-called asylum seekers committing murders, rapes, even terror attacks, then they saw people being arrested for speaking up about these horrors on social media. Now, with the government still refusing to enforce our borders, some have decided to take matters into their own hands.

Labourites are patting themselves on the back for a 44 per cent drop in illegal migrants crossing the Channel. I doubt even they believe this is down to them. Illegal entrants have fallen by a similar amount across Europe this year, aided by greater stability in ‘origin countries’ such as Syria. Meanwhile, Burnham is as unwilling as his predecessor to leave the European Convention on Human Rights and properly assert our sovereignty.

All Labour’s more piddling measures – such as beefing up border policing in France – appear to be achieving is spreading the dinghy journeys across the south coast. Whereas boats would usually travel from Calais to Dover, the narrowest bit of the Channel, they are now beginning to leave as far west as the Bay of the Seine, before sailing more than 30 hours towards Hampshire.

If it continues down this path, the government is doomed to a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Where one route becomes tricky for the people smugglers, another, more dangerous one will spring up. Meanwhile, so long as the good weather holds, police can expect protests wherever boats land or migrants are accommodated.

Andy Burnham, MP for TikTok, is a prime minister obsessed with comms, with image. But the horrific optics of the small-boats crisis appear to pass him by. What we saw off the coast of Hampshire last night was the state scurrying to receive people who have no right to be here, ferrying them into free accommodation, before showing up to police the inevitable protest. More and more people are asking who the British state is actually for. So long as they do, these protests will continue.