Brexit champion Nigel Farage has cried “invasion!” as it is revealed that at least 419 hotels across Britain have been filled with migrants, as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government looks set to take over sites like holiday camps to host even more.
“So, we’ve been talking a lot about hotels, migrant hotels, springing up all over the UK,” said the Reform UK (Brexit Party) honorary president in a short video shared on social media.
“I’ve said to you not long back that I thought that number must be north of 300. Well, I’m sorry for misinforming you; I’ve just seen [a Freedom of Information request response and], as of the 10th of November, 419 hotels have been taken across the country. By now, that figure will be even higher,” Farage suggested.
“It is out of control; there are very, very few towns now unaffected by this,” he added.
Hotel accommodation for migrants, many of them people who paid organised criminals to transport them across the English Channel on small boats — usually only part of the way, with the UK Border Force and organisations like the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) typically collecting them at sea to bring them the rest of the way rather than turning them back like the Australians — was confirmed to be costing British taxpayers close to £7 million a day in October.
With many more migrants having arrived since then, the cost is surely now even higher — at a time when Britons are being punished with cutbacks and tax hikes by Prime Minister Sunak and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, in the name of “fiscal discipline”.
Incredibly, the only solution Sunak appears to be offering to the crisis in the short to medium term — bearing in mind the fact that the government first declared Channel crossings a “major incident” in 2018, so they have had years to get a grip on the ever-worsening situation — is to propose that migrants be hosted in student accommodation and literal holiday camps instead, with this being sold as a “tough” reform of the status quo, somehow.
Proposals to put migrants in listed buildings originally intended for students at Hull University and Pontins holiday camps in Lancashire, East Sussex, and Somerset have raised eyebrows among Conservative (Tory) Party backbenchers, however, including former Cabinet minister and party leadership contender David Davis.
“If this deal were to go ahead it could see over 1,000 migrants housed in the village of Cottingham, ignoring local concerns about healthcare, education and children’s services and the impact it could have on Albanian organised crime in Hull,” he said of the student accommodation plan in comments quoted by The Telegraph.
Another Tory MP and local Tory councillors for the Southport area, where one of the holiday camps earmarked for migrants is based, also expressed concern about the “detrimental” impact on the community in general and the important local tourism trade in particular.
Britons who have booked events and stays at hotels later taken for use by migrants typically have their booking cancelled — often staff are also often fired as government contractors awash with cash from the migrant crisis such as Serco move their own people in to run the site — so the generally working-class patrons and employees of the holiday camps may all face losing out as well.
A source at the perennially incompetent Home Office, which has previously suggested hosting migrants in tent cities in London parks — has sneered at these objections, however.
“It’s ironic that some of the MPs who shout the loudest about the migrant accommodation problem are also the same ones working to block more sustainable sites so we can get migrants out of expensive hotels,” they remarked — as if blocking or swiftly removing boat migrants instead of allowing them to continue arriving in the country and live off the taxpayer indefinitely was simply not an option.