Brexit leader Nigel Farage told Breitbart News about the viral success of his drive to expose the emerging scandal of illegal migrant boats crossing the English Channel, aided by the apparent collusion of the British and French governments, promising to keep reporting on the phenomenon.
Speaking to Breitbart editor in chief Alex Marlow on the Friday edition of the Breitbart News Daily show on Sirius XM Patriot, Brexit veteran turned journalist and broadcaster Nigel Farage related his recent experiences on and off England’s South coast. Explaining how the growing issue of boat migrants arriving in England — a relatively new form of illegal migration to the United Kingdom, first gaining prominence in 2016, around the time of the Europe Migrant Crisis — had for too long been underplayed or ignored by the mainstream media, Mr Farage said he’d taken to driving to the coast and even going to sea to record the reality.
Mr Farage said: “It began in 2016 with a few hundred people coming across in these small boats, but it has now reached a more serious level. Since lockdown on the 23rd of March, over 1,000 — that we know of — have been stopped crossing the English channel, and many others have arrived in the dead of night and simply disappeared… I’d picked up gossip and rumours about a degree of collusion between the French and the British governments, so I set out over the course of the last three weeks to try and raise the issue.”
Over the course of a couple of weeks, Mr Farage was able to film migrant boats and UK border force craft bringing illegals ashore, and was on the first boat to meet an illegal boat mid-channel, monitoring its progress before handing it over to the authorities. But perhaps the most sensational development was Mr Farage filming the long-rumoured “hand over” of migrants from a French government vessel to a UK government vessel mid-English Channel.
Further research by Breitbart London using transponder data from ships in the English Channel has confirmed the meeting took place, and furthermore that the French patrol boat involved had made another handover days before, operating within four and a half miles of the English coast off Pett Level.
While the British government has since strenuously asserted that the mid-sea transaction was in accordance with international maritime law and that no collaboration took place, the new evidence has been seen to have spoken for itself.
Mr Farage claimed in his original expose that his craft had been threatened separately by both the British and French ships in the Channel for being present and filming the proceedings, events which he elaborated upon in his Breitbart News Daily interview. He told Alex Marlow: “I witnessed a French naval vessel literally escorting one of these inflatable dinghies across the line from French waters to British waters, where they literally handed it over to a British border forces vessel.
“We were threatened by the French Navy that if we stayed in French waters we would be boarded, and would probably have to spend a night or two in a French prison, and didn’t like the sound of that very much. And we were even threatened by the UK Coastguard because they knew we had a film crew on board from the previous boat we’d found, and given over to the authorities, and we were even threatened by the UK coastguard that if we filmed the handover the skipper could well lose his job and his living.
“It’s just incredible, the extent to which they want to hush this whole thing up because it’s too embarrassing.”
This was not the first time Mr Farage triggered the interest of the authorities for his activities in recording illegal migrants arriving in the United Kingdom. In early May, after a day’s filming in Kent Mr Farage received a late-night visit from two police officers because he had allegedly broken the terms of the coronavirus. There are exemptions to the lockdown for journalists that Mr Farage, who writes a regular newspaper column and hosts a national talk radio programme, may come under.
Recalling the incident, Mr Farage said Friday: “I went down to parts of our south coast, I made a series of videos which I posted online, I even got a knock at the door from the police at ten o’clock at night to tell me I’d done wrong and to consider my actions. Extraordinary. I tell you what, I just ignored them. If they want to put me in prison they can, I just couldn’t care less.”
This spirit to keep doing the right thing in the face of official disapproval that fired Mr Farage through his 25-year campaign to achieve Brexit, and appears to persist now. As for his plans for the coming weeks, he was clear. Mr Farage told Breitbart: “frankly, we’re approaching the summer months when temperatures are up, seas flatter and calmer, and I think unless something is done, we are on the edge of witnessing an invasion into our country.
“What I did on Wednesday blew the whole thing apart. People now realise what is going on, there is a lot of public anger, and we are even getting some mainstream media now reporting what’s going on. It’s been a three or four-week project so far, but I’m not giving up and I’ll be back out in the English Channel next week and I will keep proving the point over, and over again.
“One of the points of Brexit was we were going to become an independent, self-governing nation that controlled its borders and its own destiny. To see our immigration rules, to see the rule of law, to see ourselves being made a mockery of, is something I want to fight.”
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