Boris Johnson’s government has sent soldiers to fortify the Polish border and chastised Vladimir Putin for his alleged role in the Belarus migrant crisis, even as France lets boat migrants flood Britain.
“A small team of UK Armed Forces personnel have deployed following agreement with the Polish government to explore how we can provide engineering support to address the ongoing situation at the Belarus border,” a spokesman for Britain’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) said on Friday, in reference to the escalating attempts by mostly Middle Eastern migrants directed by Belarusian forces to breach the European Union’s eastern frontier.
Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Truss, the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Affairs in the Johnson administration, then penned a lengthy Sunday article for the Telegraph blasting Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko and his alleged puppetmaster, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, for the crisis, accusing them of having “carefully crafted [the] crisis [in] an attempt to divert attention away from the litany of abhorrent acts and human rights violations that the regime has already committed” in Belarus.
“We are not just standing side by side with Poland as it bears the brunt of this shameful manufactured migrant crisis, but also the others in the Visegrad Four – Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic – and our friends in the Baltics and Ukraine,” Truss insisted.
This rousing British rhetoric comes as Britain’s own borders are being repeatedly violated by sometimes over a thousand illegal migrants a day in the English Channel, with Emmanuel Macron’s France seemingly having little interest in stopping more than a token number of their boats.
Indeed, after a record-breaking number of migrants reached Britain on Thursday sources within the British government complained to the Telegraph that the French government — which has received tens of millions of pounds from the British taxpayer to stop the boats operating from their shores — had “failed in their duty to protect life and to uphold the joint agreement to stop small boats leaving France. They let hundreds of people potentially set sail to their death whilst only stopping a couple of boats.”
“They appear to have ceded sovereign territory to criminal people-smugglers. This abject failure will be raised in the strongest possible terms with [French interior minister] Gerald Darmanin and the French government,” the source added — although neither bribery nor cajoling has done anything to get the French to stop the crisis from steadily worsening in the years since crossings were first declared a “major incident” in 2018.
In contrast to the Polish authorities, Britain’s own Border Force has shown little appetite for forcefully preventing illegal immigration, with sources within the agency briefing the press that, despite new government instructions authorising them to turn boat migrants back at sea instead of escorting them to Britain, this “is not likely to ever happen.”
Meanwhile, a leaked speech by Border Force’s outgoing chief, Paul Lincoln, suggests he was not exactly passionate about enforcing borders, telling listeners: “We’re all human beings, we’re all mammals, we’re all rocks, plants, rivers. Bloody borders are just such a pain in the bloody ass.”