Britain’s new Home Office Secretary is reportedly mulling the implementation of more measures designed to curb the ongoing English Channel migrant crisis.
Suella Braverman, the newly-appointed Secretary of State for the Home Department, or Home Office, is said to be considering the implementation of a variety of further measures aimed at curtailing the ongoing boat migrant crisis occurring on the English Channel.
Tens of thousands of illegal boat migrants have already landed in Britain so far this year, with the previous Home Office chief, Priti Patel, completely failing to get a handle on the crisis, with many of her tough-sounding schemes to deal with the issue falling flat on their faces.
According to a report by The Telegraph, Braverman is looking to buck this trend, with the incoming Home Office head saying that she aimed to take “firmer line” against traffickers.
“This is not just a manifesto pledge, people are dying,” the publication reports Braverman, formerly Attorney-General, as saying.
As part of this redoubled effort to get the crisis under control, the Home Secretary wants to make Patel’s floundering Rwanda migrant relocation scheme work as part of an effort to make “offshore processing of asylum applications” the norm for Britain.
Also reportedly expected is a bill that will close loopholes in the United Kingdom’s anti-modern slavery legislation, which makes it hard to deport illegal migrants from nations such as Albania if they falsely claim to be modern slaves.
Allies of Braverman say that she is also looking at the possibility of deploying Border Force agents on the beaches of France, expressing interest in joint UK-France enforcement patrols taking place in French territory.
Such a proposal is not new, however, with Boris Johnson’s government previously pitching the idea in an open letter to French president Emmanuel Macron containing various suggestions on how the two nations could better deal with the crisis late last year.
While the open letter seemingly aimed to strike a positive tone of cooperation, even praising France’s supposed efforts to control to crisis up until that point, the memo ended up going down like a lead balloon with French authorities, kicking off a mini-foreign relations crisis between the two nations that saw Priti Patel disinvited from a major meeting being held by the Macron government.
Despite such a visceral reaction to the suggestion last time, it appears that British authorities believe that this time could be different, with politicians putting down the previous outright hostile backlash from Macron to the fact that he was about to contest a French presidential election and did not want to be seen as bowing to Brexit Britain.
“A lot of the French opposition was Emmanuel Macron posturing around the presidential election,” one MP is reported by The Telegraph as saying. “We do joint security, we do joint intelligence and we do need joint patrols on their side.”
Nevertheless, it is unclear whether this proposal — nor any of the other new measures thought to be being considered by Braverman — will be successful in curtailing the seemingly endless waves of boat migrants hitting the shores of Britain, especially considering that many within the United Kingdom’s own Civil Service have up until now been actively trying to sabotage the various border control measures dreamt up by the previous government.
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