Andy Burnham is saying nothing. Despite organised protests on the streets of the South Coast, with the Port of Dover blockaded by masked men and angry crowds milling through Portsmouth, the Prime Minister still refuses to address the country’s most contentious issue.

Mass migration, and the influx of so-called asylum seekers who dangerously cross the Channel crammed on to overcrowded rubber dinghies, has tipped beyond crisis point into a full-blown national emergency.

Yet the Government is desperate to ignore it. I cannot believe this is simply because Burnham and his Cabinet don’t know what to do about it. They don’t, but then they don’t know how to solve many other problems, yet have plenty to say.

No, the reason for the PM’s refusal to confront the issue is more obvious, and rooted in the short-term, feel-good politics in which he specialises.

He is clearly tempted by the idea of a snap general election. And for that to be a success, he needs to focus the national conversation on topics that favour him: cutting bus fares; reducing VAT on household energy bills; setting up No10 North; and similar domestic issues.

He’s horrified by the thought of tackling migration. That would mean alienating his own party’s Left wing – which has been drawn into an irrational alliance with extremist Muslims – even if by not doing so he risks enraging Labour’s working class base, especially in Red Wall constituencies where he poses as the ‘King of the North’.

But if he follows his own instincts to tread a middle way, as he appears to be doing, he will end up offending everyone. Unlike the previous Downing Street incumbent, Burnham does have some self-awareness. He knows how easily he could end up displeasing everyone. A prime minister with true leadership qualities, such as Margaret Thatcher, wouldn’t care about that. But Burnham has made it very clear how much he despises Mrs T.

The fact that, 36 years after she left power, he remains incapable of acknowledging her achievements is proof he truly does not understand how to be a leader.

The result of silence is inaction. Yesterday’s Daily Mail front page revealed how utterly empty all of Labour’s promises on tightening immigration laws have been.

The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has been accused of ‘chickening out’ on pledges to combat widespread abuse of Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) rules. And her voice has been demonstrably quieter since the Burnham ascendancy.

The cost of doing nothing is heavy. Two million migrants, legally or illegally, have arrived in Britain over the past five years, and each one who is granted refugee status can cost the taxpayer hundreds of thousands of pounds over a lifetime.

Last year, the Home Secretary’s own consultation paper admitted that, under current guidelines, migrants will qualify for full welfare payments and council housing after five years in the UK.

That means the wave of migrants since 2021 are now starting to claim those rights, which will put huge additional strain on an already over-burdened benefits budget.

By the Home Office’s own admission, ILR applications are soaring. In the 12 months to June this year, there were 199,628 successful claims, an increase of 24 per cent on the previous year. That works out to about one every two minutes, night and day.

And the pace is accelerating. The number of applications between March and June this year was 38 per cent higher than in the previous quarter.

Labour saw this fiscal catastrophe coming. It promised to do something about it, by proposing some relatively stringent initiatives. But we now know these were quietly ditched after the Labour Left immediately made clear their opposition. Angela Rayner, now Burnham’s housing secretary, called the scheme ‘wrong’ and ‘un-British’.

What’s all too British is the hapless handling of asylum claims. According to the comments of a Home Office whistleblower published yesterday, just one in 100 appeals are genuine. The rest – 99 per cent of them – are bogus.

Almost all migrants appear to receive coaching from lawyers, charity workers or advisers, who actually work with the people-smuggling gangs. They are taught to manipulate the system by following scripts, and the result is worse than farcical: It’s a travesty, an insult to our national sense of generosity and fair play.

Hundreds of Iraqi Kurds have claimed, for example, to be dating the daughter of Kurdistan’s prime minister – a supposed romantic entanglement that has put their lives in danger. A similar story has hundreds of Pakistani men all claiming to be in a gay relationship with the same one man, who will happily provide written confirmation of their relationship on demand.

Other Pakistani men produce photographs of themselves topless at a gay club, embracing similarly half-naked men – a crude pretence that has the air of openly mocking Britain’s tolerant attitude to all sexualities.

‘There’s almost no aspect of the asylum system that isn’t either a massive fraud or just really dysfunctional,’ the whistleblower said. ‘Nothing works as it should.’

That implies a complacency within Whitehall that has not arisen by accident. Britain’s bureaucrats are not notably naive. It would be unwise to lie on a tax return, for example, or to spin a story when disputing a speeding ticket. People who try that often end up in court.

Yet it appears the UK Visas and Immigration department is happy to accept palpable lies and obviously fraudulent evidence if it enables them to tick a box that allows a migrant indefinite leave to remain.

One reason for that appears to be sheer laziness: Rubberstamping an asylum claim takes minutes, while rejecting it can mean hours of paperwork.

If the Home Office is happy to accept lies, it also appears comfortable with telling them. One government spokesman said: ‘The Home Secretary has been clear that those trying to defraud the British people to remain in the UK will have their application refused and find themselves on a one-way flight out of Britain.’

That’s simply not true. Enforced deportations are far from the norm. According to Home Office statistics, fewer than 4,000 people were forcibly removed under government regulations in the 12 months to June this year.

We now know that Labour has no intention of tackling the immigration disaster engulfing our country.

If Andy Burnham decides not to risk a snap election, the country will have no say about this policy of wilful neglect until the end of the Government’s full term, in 2029.

That can only fuel more direct-action demonstrations of the kind that have caused chaos in Dover and Portsmouth. While these are not in the British tradition, they have arisen because successive governments have failed to address the causes of this public anger through political solutions, leaving the way open for more radical responses.

Ignoring this emergency will only magnify the consequences. If the PM wants to restore faith in our system, he must take real action now.

is a co-founder and executive director of The Henry Jackson Society