Who Gets to Be Saved?

On Sunday night, September 6, a small boat carrying roughly 120 people was brought into Langstone Harbour in Portsmouth. Lifeboat volunteers from the Royal National Lifeboat Institution had been tasked by the coastguard to meet it. That is what they do. They have done it for over two hundred years.

By the time the buses arrived to take the people for processing, more than 200 protesters were at the harbour. Many wore balaclavas. They tried to block the coaches. They clashed with police.

In the days since, RNLI volunteers have been called traitors. The charity has put barriers around its memorial to volunteers who died saving others. It has told crews they may take off their RNLI jackets in public if wearing them feels unsafe. It has told them they may close a lifeboat station if they feel in danger.

Read that again. People who row into the Channel at night to pull strangers out of the water have been told to hide who they are.

I founded Swim Global Project because I believe every person deserves the chance to be safe in, on, and around water. For a long time I held on to a comforting belief: that this was the one thing everyone could agree on. Learning to swim. Teaching water safety. Keeping lifeguards on the beach. Surely this was bipartisan. Surely this was above the fray.

That belief was naive. I say that about myself, not anyone else. Water has always been political. I just did not want to see it.

The question underneath the noise

Strip away the slogans and the Portsmouth protest comes down to one question. Do we get to decide who gets to live?

The RNLI’s answer has never changed. Its chief executive, Peter Sparkes, said this week that illegal immigration is a political question and that the RNLI’s job is to save lives at sea, full stop. The charity’s own figures show Channel crossings made up about 1.2 percent of its launches in 2024. The vast majority of its work is fishermen, swimmers, paddleboarders, families cut off by the tide. Yet that 1.2 percent is what people are throwing abuse at.

This is not new. In 2021 Nigel Farage called the RNLI a “taxi service” for migrants. Donations to the charity surged in response. But the temperature has changed since then. France has banned British far-right activists for targeting migrant boats on its coast. Two British men were arrested near Calais this year on suspicion of inciting hatred. And now a lifeboat crew doing exactly what it was founded to do has become a target.

Lifesaving does not check papers. A person in the water is a person in the water. The moment we accept that some people in the water are less deserving of rescue, we have not just lost a policy argument. We have lost the foundation the entire field stands on.

It happened here too

If you think this is a European story, look closer to home.

In August 2025, the United States government terminated the small team of scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who had been building the country’s first real national picture of drowning: who is drowning, where, and what actually works to stop it. The team had been placed on administrative leave in April. The administration’s fiscal year 2026 budget request proposed eliminating the program outright.

Drowning kills more than 4,000 people a year in the United States. It is the leading cause of death for children ages one to four. The program being cut was created after the pandemic, when drowning among young children rose sharply. Jim Mercy, who led the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention before retiring, put it plainly: if the program saved one life, it would have paid for itself many times over.

I want to be fair here. The CDC Foundation’s Understanding and Preventing Drowning program, which works with states to strengthen drowning data and build partnerships, has continued its work. As I write this, it is running state webinars in Michigan, California, Georgia, and Arizona. That work is good. It matters. But a philanthropic bridge is not a federal commitment. When a government decides that counting the dead is not a priority, that is a political choice. It was made by people. It can be unmade by people.

Water has always been political

Here is the part I had to learn, and keep learning.

In 1959, the city of Montgomery, Alabama closed its entire public parks system rather than integrate it. The pools stayed closed for years. In Jackson, Mississippi, the city shut its public pools in 1963 instead of opening them to Black residents. In 1971 the United States Supreme Court, in Palmer v. Thompson, ruled 5 to 4 that a city could close its pools for everyone rather than share them. Historian Jeff Wiltse documented this in Contested Waters: pools that had once been the heart of working-class neighborhoods were drained, filled in, or handed to private clubs.

The swimming gap between Black and white Americans that we still measure today did not come from nowhere. It was built. Deliberately. With policy.

In Australia, the 1965 Freedom Ride led by Charles Perkins stopped at Moree, where Aboriginal people were banned from the town’s public baths. The confrontation at that pool became one of the defining moments of the Aboriginal civil rights movement. Under apartheid, South Africa’s beaches were segregated by law, and the shadow of that still shapes who drowns and who does not.

In France, towns have banned the burkini from beaches and pools, and at the Paris Olympics French athletes were barred from competing in the hijab. Whatever one thinks of those rules, their effect is measurable. Some women and girls stop coming to the water. Some never learn to swim.

And in the quieter version of the same story, playing out right now across the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States: public pools close. Budgets shrink. Energy costs climb. Lifeguards cannot be hired at the wages offered. A council or a county decides a pool is a luxury. The neighborhoods that lose their pool first are almost never the wealthy ones. Nobody passes a law saying certain children will not learn to swim. They just remove the place where it would have happened.

That is what I mean when I say water is political. Not partisan. Political. Every decision about who has access to water, who is taught, who is guarded, and who is rescued is a decision about whose life is worth the cost.

It’s not if but when

I still believe water safety can be bipartisan. In legislatures, it often is. I have sat in rooms where people who agree on almost nothing agreed that a child should not die in a backyard pool.

But bipartisan support for a bill does not protect a program from a budget. It does not keep a pool open. It does not stop a mob at a harbour. Drowning prevention lives or dies in the spaces between the votes: in appropriations, in zoning, in hiring, in what a community decides it will and will not tolerate.

It’s not if but when. When the next boat sinks in the Channel. When the next child drowns in a county that closed its pool. When the next dataset that would have told us where to intervene simply stops being collected. These are not accidents. They are outcomes.

What we do now

Here is what I am asking of everyone who reads this.

Say it out loud. The ability to swim and to be safe in water is a human right. Rescue is unconditional. If you work in this field, put those two sentences somewhere public with your name next to them.

Defend the rescuers. Write to the RNLI. Donate if you can. Tell the volunteers in your own community, at your beach, at your pool, that you see them. If someone in your circle repeats the lie that lifeboat crews are traitors, do not let it pass.

Follow the money. Find out whether your country, state, or province funds drowning surveillance. If it does not, ask why. If it stopped, ask who decided. Data is not bureaucracy. It is how we learn which children are dying and how to stop it.

Fight for the pool. When a public pool is threatened in your community, show up. Ask who loses access. Ask what it will cost, in lives and in dollars, to have a generation that never learned. Closing a pool is a policy decision. Treat it like one.

Talk about migration and water safety together. Our field has been too quiet on this. People drown crossing borders every week, in the Channel, the Mediterranean, the Rio Grande, the Darién. If we are serious about preventing drowning, we cannot pretend those deaths belong to someone else’s agenda.

I was naive. I thought the water was neutral ground. It never was. But that is not a reason to step back. It is the reason to step forward, name the politics for what they are, and refuse to let anyone decide that some lives are not worth pulling from the water.

The RNLI’s answer to the crowd at Portsmouth was simple. They will always answer the call, whoever needs their help.

So will we.

Nathalie