A smuggling kingpin whose network plagues Europe laughed off Labour’s migrant crackdown, declaring “demand is too high” to reach Britain for its “hospitality” and “hotels”.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood will on Tuesday overhaul the asylum system in a bid to end the small boats crisis.

But Afghan criminal ‘Haji Ajmal’ sensationally claimed his gang has informants “inside” the British state tipping them off about security checks in Dover and helping them to avoid detection.

And the gangster goaded ministers as he compared politicians to smugglers for always breaking their promises on deportations.

Ajmal, speaking from a secret location in Turkey, told the Express: “We have been hearing this for many, many years.

“There is concern about being arrested. But we have some people inside of the government to report to us what’s happening. They give us some information.

“This is not only in the UK. There are people in the border areas, border police, they have some kind of cooperation with us. There are some people who are taking money. They are helping us.

“I can’t say how many people are in the UK. They will give us reports ‘okay, we have checkpoints’ or ‘today, we have police searching’.

“We get all this information from our contacts inside of the government.”

Asked if the threats of a crackdown led by the National Crime Agency and European allies would put him off, Ajmal – not his real name – told the Express: “Demand is too high.

“There are a lot of people that are asking us to go to Europe. When demand is high, of course we will take the risk.

“There are a lot of people, especially from Afghanistan, who would like to come to Europe.

“They would like to go to the UK. One of the reasons people would like to go to the UK is because there are rumours, reports, among the Afghan people that there is very good hospitality from the UK, including hotels, and their families are encouraging them.

“The risk is more on the people, not us. These people are going by boats. That’s the risk.”

And the criminal who has smuggled people into and across Europe for 15 years warned Home Secretary Ms Mahmood that demand for his services is increasing.

He said: “If the situation in the security of countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, Iran gets worse, of course, the demand is going to be high.

“The demand is increasing. People are leaving their countries. They would like to go to safer countries. This is our business.

“It depends on the security situation in the world. We will keep continuing business.”

Asked if he would make a lot of money, Ajmal admits: “Of course. But it has a lot of expenses too. It’s not like everything is coming to us.”

Ms Mahmood has vowed to ramp up removals of small boat migrants.

And the Home Secretary will launch new legislation next week to stop migrants “gaming the system” by using human rights laws to avoid deportation.

Her new immigration and asylum bill will overhaul human rights laws by tightening the rules around Article 8 rights to a family life.

The reforms will also make it harder for asylum seekers to lodge modern slavery claims.

But Ajmal told the Express: “This comes from the media all of the time. They have been saying this for 20/25 years – ‘we will do this, we will do that’.

“It doesn’t affect our work. We haven’t seen a massive deportation from any country in the past few years.

“It comes into the news a lot, but there’s not any action. We have been hearing these kinds of rumours for a long, long time.

“Not only in the UK, but in Europe as well, anyone who is a candidate running for President or Prime Minister says a lot of things about refugees.

“They give a lot of promises that they will just deport them. When they come to power, they will not do that. It’s just normal politics.

“I’m not an educated person, but at least I know a little bit about politics. We tell a lot of things to our clients. ‘Okay, we’ll take you to the UK, or Europe, without any problems’. ‘We will do this, we will do that’. But when it comes to action, we miss a lot of things.

“We are much better than politicians. At least we manage to send some people to the other destinations.”

Only 7,500 of the 200,000 migrants who have crossed the Channel have been removed since the small boats crisis began in 2018.

Around 70% of those booted out were to Albania.

And gangs have responded to an intensification of policing around Calais and Dunkirk by spreading further out along the coastline, with launches detected in Dieppe and Belgium in recent weeks.

Immigration officials have also seen evidence criminals are using lorries to smuggle migrants deported to France under Keir Starmer’s one-in-one-out deal with Emmanuel Macron.

Ajmal added: “It’s not easy. But we know how to find a way. Each route has a different cost. We will give the routes ‘okay, we have a boat with this cost’ and it takes one hour, two hours. We will say we have routes by truck and that will cost a different amount of money.

“We will give all the route options to our customers and they will choose which one they want.”

The Afghan criminal said his network has a “team” in France who receive the “customers.”

He added: “They check the situation, with the weather, and we have our people on the other side – in the UK. They will calculate the situation with the security, with the weather, with everything.

“The cost is from £1,500, £2,000, £2,500.”