The British government is looking at putting up migrants on cruise ships and in holiday parks as it struggles to accommodate the influx in expensive hotels.
With many communities, even small villages, complaining of having large numbers of unvetted migrants rammed into sometimes luxurious hotels in their midst at the taxpayers’ expense with little or zero consultation or consideration for the impact on public services, the Conservative Party government needs new ways to host the ever-increasing flood of migrants illegally entering Britain.
While once it considered such facilities as disused British Army barracks, it is now considering venues including cruise ships and holiday parks — a measure Robert Jenrick, a junior minister at the Home Office led by Suella Braverman, is trying to sell as tough love, despite it being something regular citizens would pay for as a form of recreation.
“Human decency has to be accompanied by hard-headed common sense: illegal immigrants are not entitled to luxury hotels. Conditions in the UK are almost always better than in neighbouring countries, which helps explain why the UK is a destination of choice for economic migrants on the continent ‘asylum shopping’,” — Jenrick argued — as if hosting new arrivals on cruise ships, as the Scottish government did with some actual refugees from Ukraine and in holiday parks such as Pontins would be “hard-headed” rather another form of largesse.
“The scale of the problem is huge — as things stand, the number of migrants and asylum seekers has outstripped our capacity, and the reality is that we have just weeks to solve this current backlog crisis,“ a Home Office source told the Sunday Express.
“We need to examine other options, and the use of off-season holiday camps is an attractive idea. They are enclosed, meaning that we can provide medical and educational services whilst ensuring asylum seekers remain contained, and they would buy us breathing space, while potentially offering another stream of revenue to facilities which are not used over the winter months,” the added — somewhat misleadingly, given migrants are left essentially at large in the country while their asylum claims are processed, and very seldom “contained” in actual detention, particularly at hotels and similar accommodation.
However, as with many balloons the government has sent while claiming it is about to get tough on the ever-worsening illegal immigration crisis, the supposedly “hard-headed” plan to host migrants at holiday parks may have been popped already, as most leading companies in the industry, including Butlin’s, Warner Leisure Hotels, Park Holiday Homes, and the aforementioned Pontins are actually open year-round.
“All Warner properties are open all year round, with thousands of guests already booked to enjoy short breaks throughout the winter months, achieving high occupancy throughout the year,” said a spokesman for one of the companies.
The Sunday Express also mentioned that the government is looking to give migrants thousands of military homes — a scheme they have been less keen to emphasise to the press, and one likely the further scandalise the public given the number of veterans and other local people who are homeless.