An official report on Britain’s Border Force found it has been “ineffective” in tackling the Channel boat migrants crisis, and may even have made things worse.
The independent Review of Border Force by Alexander Downer, Australian foreign minister for many years in the 1990s and early 2000s and, more recently, the Commonwealth country’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, had been commissioned by Home Secretary, Priti Patel MP.
“Migrants entering the UK from France are entering the UK from a safe country. There is no reason for people to be using this dangerous route and its use needs to be disincentivised,” Downer noted in his report, adding that the British government’s “overall approach to this problem over the past few years has been ineffective and possibly counter-productive in preventing these journeys.”
“Border Force, which exists to protect the UK border, is effectively rescuing people and then escorting them into port and enabling them to enter the UK,” he explained, adding dryly that it “is unsurprising that there is some public disquiet about this issue.”
Not once has Border Force turned a boat around in the Channel — something Downer said it should be doing when circumstances allow — and has often seemed less than enthusiastic about border enforcement, with its outgoing leader Paul Lincoln complaining in somewhat bizarre terms in late 2021 that “[w]e’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.”
Downer appeared to back the government’s plan to transfer asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing — unimplemented, as of the time of publication, due to activist lawyers and an anonymous judge at the European Court of Human Rights blocking all flights — given his native Australia’s experience ending a similar problem with migrant boats by transferring them to the island nations of Nauru and Vanuatu.
“The rapid movement of people that have entered the UK illegally to a third country reduces the risk of the removal process being frustrated. The eligibility for removal should embrace all cohorts of people who enter the UK illegally,” he explained, accounting for the fact that, once they are on British soil, most bogus asylum seekers are never removed even after their claims are rejected.
A more fundamental issue with Border Force the report identified is that it seems staff may literally do not know what they are doing, with “the latest survey of Border Force staff [finding] Border Force continually scored below the Home Office average on questions regarding understanding their work objectives.”
Downer also noted manpower issues with Border Force, citing “data prepared informally by Border Force [which] suggests that [it] has a lower staff to passenger and goods volume ratio than Australia, New Zealand or the USA.”
“This is a thorough and painstaking report with which Alexander Downer pulls no punches,” said Alp Mehmet, chairman of the Migration Watch UK think tank, in comments to Breitbart London.
“Going by Mr Downer’s damning review, the Border Force’s operational defects and tendency to lurch from crisis to crisis will not be solved by any amount of more up-to-date equipment or boost to recruitment,” he suggested.
“The Home Secretary’s ambition to have in place a ‘best in the world’ system in place by 2025 strikes me as pie in the sky. I really hope I am wrong,” he added.
Home Secretary Priti Patel’s response to the report has been characteristically delusional, however, welcoming its “constructive recommendations” and chirping that she “want[s] Border Force to exploit emerging tech [and] remain at the forefront of border control worldwide” — despite the report clearly indicating that that is not where the agency is.
The Conservative MP was viewed as tough on issues like immigration, grooming gangs, and law and order more generally before she was appointed to her role in 2019, but has squandered her reputation since then.
Deportations have collapsed, hotels have filled with tens of thousands of illegal migrants on the taxpayers’ dime, and sentencing remains pathetically weak and largely ignored as an issue by leading Tory politicians.
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