Home Secretary Priti Patel has announced that British taxpayers will be handing over £28 million to France to cajole them into stopping so many illegal aliens from pouring across the English Channel on small boats.
Patel, whose Home Office is the government department with broad responsibility for border control, immigration, policing, and national security, announced the signing of the new deal as if it were a triumph, boasting that it will pay for the French to “double number of police on beaches”, invest in “cutting-edge” surveillance tech, boost security in their ports, and, perhaps most controversially, upgrade migrants’ accommodation on the French side of the Channel.
Pro-borders campaigners and voters have been calling for the British authorities to simply start turning back migrant boats at sea, as the Australians did when they were facing a similar surge in illegal crossings, since at least 2018, when Patel’s predecessor Sajid Javid first declared a “major incident” in the Channel.
Boris Johnson’s administration still appears to be refusing to countenance this — but attempts to buy off the French to control illegal migration on their end have failed before, with the current crisis following previous payouts for them to upgrade security around Calais etc.
Indeed, the Road Haulage Association (RHA) has previously accused the French of simply “switching off” British-bought equipment intended to detect illegal migrants entering Britain by lorry — an issue which has received less coverage as boat crossings have come to the fore, although it has not gone away.
“The French don’t want migrants to stay in France. They don’t want to provide asylum – in fact, they don’t want to deal with the issue at all,” said RHA chief executive Richard Burnett in 2018.
A similarly permissive attitude has been observed with respect to boat migrants, with French ships being observed simply shadowing migrant votes discovered in their territory into British waters by Nigel Farage and, later, mainstream media journalists, with the French sometimes claiming migrants would threaten to throw children overboard if they got too close.
Neither the French or British authorities have ever announced they were pursuing charges against anyone for such crimes, however.
“We call on the government to pass legislation to the effect that anyone who enters the United Kingdom illegally, for any reason, will be immediately deported. Rather than paying foreign governments to provide border security we call on them to invest in our own border security and UK Border Force to clamp down on illegal migration,” said Ben Harris-Quinney, chairman of Britain’s oldest conservative think tank, in comments to Breitbart London.
“We have heard many good words from the Conservative Party over the past 10 years on dramatically reducing immigration, but what we have seen in the same period is record numbers of people pour into the country,” he continued.
“The public are not fools, and they can clearly see what George Osborne confirmed, the Conservative Party talk a good game on immigration, but never deliver,” he said, referring to the former Chancellor’s admission that the Tories’ never intended to keep their longstanding pledge to reduce net immigration “from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands” — now dropped by Boris Johnson.
Indeed, Harris-Quinney hinted illegal immigration should not be allowed to overshadow legal immigration, which is once again rising sharply, with the government planning to further relax restrictions next year.
The British public have consistently expressed their view, by huge majority, that immigration to the UK has been far too high over the past two decades.
“A Bow Group study found that 82 per cent of new British citizens were foreign-born, or born to foreign parent. Whilst we are told circa 300-400 thousand people come into the UK each year, these are net figures, the gross figures are 600-700 thousand people,” he pointed out.
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