Nigel Farage has slammed the mainstream media for suggesting that the public no longer cares about mass migration or what he has to say about it in a video message.
The Brexit Party leader’s riposte was prompted, in particular, by an article by Sunday Times journalist Sarah Baxter titled ‘The old Nigel Farage immigrant song sounds way off key’, in which she chastised him for his statements taking the government to task for failing to turn back the boatloads of illegal migrants crossing the English Channel from infectious French encampments.
“The home secretary, Priti Patel, is patrolling our shores, seeking to turn back boats at sea. If the French ever go along with it,” Baxter claimed, before adding that, in any case, “Immigration as a national emergency… has gone right off the boil.”
“I wonder, who is out of touch here? Is it me, or is it the mainstream media?” Farage asked.
“So what this is all about is the fact that I went down, last week, having commented on LBC, written a piece in the Daily Telegraph — I’ve got a lot of people living in East Sussex getting in touch with me, saying: ‘Look, this has been going on for a very, very long time. Yeah, sure, you see people being towed into Dover and taken into reception centres, but the story here in East Sussex is different. What’s happening here is people are arriving, they’re not being taken in by the Border Force, the police, or anybody else, and they are disappearing into the community’,” Farage explained.
“So I made a little video about it… where I talked to fishermen, one of whom said he’d seen a boat with 29 people land in a break in the cliffs, and them all disappear — ad I’ve no reason to disbelief young Freddy, the fisherman from Hastings, at all,” he said.
“So, I’ve been pursuing this, and in fact wrote to the Home office and asked them whether they accepted that migrants are not being caught, and whether they had an estimate of how many were unaccounted for, and what was being done to try and track down illegal immigrants that had evaded the border police.
“Well, the Home Office came back and said: ‘It is completely inaccurate to claims mall boats are arriving into the UK every day. We are using all the skills of the Border Force, the National Crime Agency, Immigration Enforcement, and French law enforcement (you’re having a laugh!) to dismantle and arrest the criminal gangs who trade in people-smuggling, and since April the 1st we’ve stopped so many from coming, blah blah blah blah,'” he related.
“So it’s all fine, apparently.”
Farage went on to highlight the fact that 600 people “that we know of” have entered the country since the lockdown went into effect, and around a thousand since the start of the year.
“What percentage do you think have been returned?” he asked rhetorically.
“Well, it’s about three per cent. So it’s like there’s a great big sign on the cliffs of Dover which says ‘It’s worth every penny you pay the criminal trafficking gangs because more than likely you’re going to be able to stay’,” he said.
“And the fact that Sarah Baxter, in the middle of the Sunday Times, can basically say, ‘Look, because so many people from migrant communities in the National Health Service are doing such a great job, that in future we really, really, really shouldn’t worry about immigration’ — this is not immigration, it’s illegal immigration! It’s people breaking into our borders; we have no idea who they are,” he continued.
The Brexit Party leader went on to highlight the “clear signs” of coronavirus infection among some migrants, bringing the immediate significance of the Channel crisis into sharp relief.
“But of course, [for] the Sneerocracy, it’s all to much for them,” he added, in reference to the mainstream media.
“These are Remainers… These are the people who believe in open borders,” he said.
“[W]e’re almost back to the bad old days when even discussing this is deemed to be racist — well, it’s not, and I think that for a thousand people to have come into this country [by boat] already this year is a pretty bad omen for what is to come over the course of the summer,” he warned.
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