There are some things which ought to sit above politics, and saving the life of another human being is surely one of them. That is why I have watched the growing abuse directed at the RNLI, its staff and, most disgracefully of all, its volunteer lifeboat crews with a mixture of anger and disbelief.
Over the past week, that abuse has moved well beyond people sounding off on social media. RNLI volunteers have been photographed and identified online, called “traitors” and subjected to threats; protests have been mounted outside RNLI premises, police have been required to protect the charity’s headquarters in Poole, and volunteers have been advised to think carefully about wearing RNLI-branded clothing in some circumstances. Just contemplate that for a moment; in Britain in 2026, people who freely give their time to put to sea and save strangers can find themselves intimidated for doing so.
The immediate cause, of course, is the deeply contentious issue of small boats crossing the English Channel. More than 100 people from one such boat were recently brought ashore at Portsmouth by an RNLI lifeboat; protests followed, police officers were injured and vehicles were damaged. Since then the RNLI itself, and individual volunteers associated with it, have become targets for some of those agitating against migration.
I have no difficulty at all with people arguing passionately about immigration. Governments are entitled, indeed required, to control borders; voters are entitled to be angry if they believe governments are failing to do so, and there are perfectly legitimate arguments to be had about asylum policy, Channel crossings, people smugglers, international law and what happens to people once they arrive in Britain. But directing that anger at the men and women of the RNLI is not a serious contribution to that debate; it is mindless, misplaced bigotry.
The RNLI does not decide Britain’s immigration policy. It does not determine who has a right to remain here; when HM Coastguard tasks a lifeboat to people in distress, its crews go and help them. Once those people are safe, responsibility passes to the appropriate authorities. That is not “aiding an invasion”; it is search and rescue.
There is a useful fact here which tends to disappear amid the shouting. In 2025, just 109 RNLI launches, 1.2 per cent of all its launches, were to small boats in the Channel; 94.3 per cent of those recorded as crossing the Channel in small boats were aided by other agencies such as Border Force. The suggestion that the RNLI has somehow reinvented itself as a ferry service for migrants is simply nonsense.
More fundamentally, however, I am not sure I want my lifeboat crews conducting immigration interviews before deciding whether to throw someone a line. A person in a sinking boat is a person in a sinking boat; the sea does not enquire about nationality, immigration status, religion, skin colour or political opinion before it kills you. Nor should the person coming to your rescue.
There is something else here which matters to me, because I have spent much of my life thinking about volunteering and the institutions of civil society which make it possible. We talk a great deal about rebuilding communities, strengthening social cohesion and creating a more resilient country; the RNLI is what those grand phrases look like when translated into human behaviour. Someone’s pager sounds; they leave the dinner table, the football match or their bed, and they go to help someone they have never met.
That is volunteering in its purest form, but it is also active citizenship; the decision that I have some responsibility for people beyond my family and immediate circle, and that society works better when enough of us are prepared to contribute something to it. I have argued before that Britain does not simply need “more volunteers”; it needs to nurture a culture of contribution. The RNLI has been quietly practising one for more than two hundred years.
Civil society is important precisely because it turns individual generosity into collective capability. Government cannot command somebody to care, and the market cannot manufacture the particular sense of obligation which makes a volunteer crew member put on waterproofs on a freezing night and head towards danger. Organisations such as the RNLI create the structure, training and shared purpose which allow that instinct to help to become something extraordinarily effective.
That matters well beyond the lifeboat station. A healthy country depends upon citizens who are prepared, in thousands of different ways, to say “I can help”; it also depends upon institutions which make that contribution possible. This is part of our social infrastructure, generating the trust, connection and resilience which become especially important when things go wrong.
The RNLI is perhaps one of the most dramatic examples because the consequences are so immediate. Since its foundation in 1824, its lifeboat crews and lifeguards have saved more than 146,700 lives; research published by the RNLI last year estimated that around four million people are alive today because somebody in an earlier generation was saved by the institution and went on to have children, grandchildren and descendants. Four million people; families, friendships and whole branches of family trees which might otherwise never have existed.
Those figures are worth dwelling on because they remind us what the RNLI actually represents. For generations, ordinary people have answered the call because somebody they did not know was in trouble; sometimes they have done so in conditions which most of us would find terrifying. They did not first ask whether the person in danger was sensible, deserving, British or even particularly likeable.
This is also why the present attacks seem to me especially corrosive. One of the challenges already facing volunteering is that we can make contributing harder than it needs to be; layers of process, regulation and risk management can slowly turn an act of generosity into an obstacle course. Safeguarding and good governance matter enormously, but our institutions must constantly ask whether they are enabling people to contribute or getting in their way. The last thing we need is another deterrent; the possibility that someone who volunteers for a charity may be abused, threatened or publicly targeted because a mob dislikes the people they have been asked to help.
If we genuinely want a stronger civil society, then there has to be something of a compact involved. We ask citizens to step forward; institutions train, support and organise them, and the wider community respects the legitimacy of their service even when it dislikes the circumstances in which that service is required. Once we decide that volunteers are fair game for intimidation because they have carried out their duty impartially, we weaken something much bigger than one charity.
To me, that is one of the things which makes the RNLI such an extraordinarily British institution. Not flag waving, not angry people shouting about patriotism, but practical courage; people quietly getting on with the job, looking after strangers and accepting that when somebody is drowning you save them first and ask questions later. I find the notion that such people should now be branded traitors almost grotesque.
There is a particularly nasty cowardice in targeting individual volunteers. They did not devise the Government’s asylum policy; they did not create the criminal gangs putting desperate people into dangerous boats, and they cannot solve the wider political questions surrounding migration. They answered their pagers and did what generations of lifeboat crews before them have done.
If people want fewer dangerous Channel rescues, then campaign for policies which mean fewer people make dangerous Channel crossings. Argue with ministers; vote governments out; demand better international cooperation, more effective action against criminal gangs or whatever policy response you believe will work. But do not demand that a volunteer standing on the deck of a lifeboat should allow a fellow human being to drown in order to make your political point.
There is, thankfully, another side to this story. Following the attacks, the RNLI reported a significant increase in donations; rather a lot of people, it seems, responded to the intimidation in the most practical way possible, by putting their hands in their pockets and backing the lifeboats. I rather like that response because it too says something about civil society; when an institution people value is attacked, they need not simply tut from the sidelines, they can choose to support it.
I have been a volunteer in one form or another for most of my life, and I have had the enormous privilege of working alongside many thousands more. One of the things that experience has taught me is that volunteering at its best reminds us that we are not simply consumers of services or spectators of society; we are participants in it. There is something particularly powerful about the RNLI version of that bargain; you may never know the person whose life you save, and they may have absolutely nothing in common with you, but you go anyway.
At a time when we hear so much about division, mistrust and the fraying of our common life, perhaps we should pay rather more attention to that simple instinct. A healthy society needs people prepared to say, “I can help”, and organisations capable of turning that willingness into action; that is not a sentimental extra to a functioning country, it is one of the things which makes a country function.
That is why I hope the RNLI does not shift one inch from its fundamental principle. Anyone can drown; anyone in distress deserves to be rescued. Immigration policy belongs to politicians and governments; saving the person in the water belongs to humanity.
And if we ever reach the point where we seriously believe that a British lifeboat should sail past people who may drown because we disapprove of how they came to be there, it will not be the RNLI which has betrayed British values; it will be us.
