Britain’s border control disaster roars on with four more killed on Friday morning, having been put on an unseaworthy boat by killer human traffickers.
Around 60 migrants were rescued by a French navy patrol boat and coastguard helicopter from a capsized inflatable boat a short distance from the French coast off Boulogne-sur-Mer, south of Calais overnight into Friday morning. The boat had got into difficulty in the English Channel shortly after leaving the French coast and four migrants winched from the water were found unresponsive and could not be revived.
Local newspaper Le Voix du Nord notes the rescue operation has not yet formally concluded, and the death toll is not final, suggesting rescuers may be alive to the possibility further victims could still be in the water.
The ongoing migrant crisis on Britain’s southern shore and the failure to do anything meaningful about it signed the death warrant of the previous British government, voted out of power last week. The new Labour government — a party broadly considered to be instinctively pro-open borders — has vowed to crack down, but appears to have taken no action yet.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who arguably has done more than anyone to bring the border crisis to public attention and hold the past government to account over it, warned the new Labour government he’d do the same to them on Friday morning. He wrote in response to the deaths: “[four] deaths in the Channel this morning, the new Government had better start moving fast.”
Open Borders Forever: Labour Vows to Keep Boat Migrant Route Open https://t.co/PqsPWWYEaT
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) May 4, 2024
The killing by callous people smugglers, who take thousands of Euros per passenger for a place on totally unsuitable and horrendously overcrowded boats, takes the death toll for attempted crossings of the English Channel to 19 this year. Some 14,000 people have crossed successfully meanwhile, up almost 20 per cent on the rate of arrivals the previous year, reports Le Figaro.
Illustrating just how overcrowded these rubber boats are when they’re launched from the beaches of northern France to reach England’s shores, the last deadly crossing wasn’t even fatal by drowning, but by crushing. The father of a seven-year-old girl who was killed on board the boat described how the boat was boarded by a group of migrant men who didn’t care who they hurt as they forced their way on board. A report of the time described the scene:
He begged those around him, including a young Sudanese man who had been among those to join the boat at the last moment, to move aside to let him grab his youngest child. “I just wanted him to move so I could pull my baby up,” Alhashimi said. He punched the man, but even that was ignored.
“That time was like death itself,” Alhashimi said. “We saw people dying. I saw how those men were behaving. They didn’t care who they were stepping on – a child, or someone’s head, young or old. People started to suffocate. I could not protect her. I will never forgive myself. But the sea was the only choice I had.”
Despite such desperate scenes, Britain persists in creating a legal and border security environment which allows migrant smugglers to continue to operate and thrive.
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