Plans by Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government for the Royal Navy to take charge of the Channel migrant crisis are a failure before they have “even started”, a parliamentary committee has warned.
Priti Patel MP, who leads the Home Office for the Johnson administration — making her broadly responsible for national security, border control, and immigration — has failed to stop the boat migrant crisis in the English Channel from steadily worsening for years now, having assumed her post in July 2019.
Her latest ploy to give members of the public the impression that the crisis is on the brink of being solved — she had previously claimed it would be brought under control once Britain finally broke with the European Union at the end of 2021, while in reality it got significantly worse — has been to try and put the Royal Navy in charge of Channel operations rather than the Home Office’s Border Force, which is not exactly enthusiastic about border enforcement.
However, as with every other supposed solution to the crisis talked up in the press — simply turning the boats back to France never being one of them — the scheme appears to be coming to nothing, with the Ministry of Defence indicating that the Royal Navy would not actually be intercepting boats or arresting migrants, and making the extraordinary claim that, in any case, operations in the Channel are “already pretty successful”.
Apparent disagreements between the Home Office and Ministry of Defence over what should actually happen once the Royal Navy is in charge of the fiasco have now been described as “deeply unedifying” by the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, with Members of Parliament suggesting that if the goal of the scheme was to “restore public confidence” it has, so far, “done the opposite, and the operation has failed before it even started.”
“We question whether announcing the policy before agreeing the detail was a wise move or rather one born of desperation,” the MPs said in comments reported by The Telegraph, adding that they “hope that lessons will be learned” — a stock expression in British politics which sets most Britons on edge, being associated with government failures for which nobody ever seems to be punished and from which no lessons do, in fact, seem to be learned.
Naval veterans have expressed concern that dragging the service into the boat migrants quagmire will achieve nothing besides encouraging more people-smuggling by increasing the number of ships in the Channel collecting migrants, and cause “reputational damage” to the Navy as “the arrival in Dover of Navy ships full of migrants” infuriates members of the public.
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