Britain’s Home Office has taken to social media to brag that the country “resettles more refugees than any other country in Europe” as it fails to stop illegal Channel crossings or organise deportations at scale.
Faced with growing public anger as the British authorities have failed for months on end now to prevent record levels of illegal sea crossings, the Home Office has pledged reform many times, and plans including using the Royal Navy to turn back boats and processing migrants on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic or on offshore ferries have been leaked.
In terms of actions actually undertaken, however, the Home Office has had little to point to besides a record number of migrants being housed at taxpayer expense in well-appointed hotels — some of them highly dangerous — and, more recently, in large, open camps on army bases, allegedly established with little or no reference to local or regional authorities.
What the Home Office have chosen to trumpet instead, curiously, is their record on taking in even more migrants through refugee resettlement, boasting that they have brought more people to the country this way than any other country in Europe.
In a short information video shared on social media, the Home Office brags that “The UK resettles more refugees than any other country in Europe”.
A bar graph shows the United Kingdom with a slide lead on France, a larger country and significantly less densely-populated country, and Sweden — which, in fairness, may still be able to claim that it is shouldering a greater burden pound-for-pound, given it has a population of only around 10 million.
Bringing up the rear behind Britain, France, and Sweden, interestingly, comes Angela Merkel’s Germany — the largest country and economy in Western Europe, as well as the country which did more than any other to ignite the 2015 migrant crisis which continues to unsettle the continent and its politics to this day.
The Home Office’s decision to crow about the number of refugees it is resettling follows a similar boast on October 5th that it was bringing in more migrants on top of the thousands crossing the Channel illegally direct from Greece through chain migration or “family reunion/reunification” — which they said was proof they are “fixing the broken system”.