Another boat migrant has died in the English Channel as the crisis continues unabated under the new left-wing Labour Party government in Britain.
As European leaders descended on Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire on Thursday for a meeting of the European Political Community — a separate institution from the EU which includes Brexit Britain — to discuss, among other issues, the crisis of illegal migration, another migrant drowned while trying to cross the Channel to the UK from the beaches of France.
The PA news agency reports that 71 more migrants were rescued by the French coastguard and another 13 were pulled out of the water by the British Border Force before being returned to France.
The latest death in the busy waterway comes less than a week after four other boat migrants drowned in the English Channel.
At the meeting of the European Political Community, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer addressed the previous deaths in the Channel, saying: “Last week four more souls, and actually last night another one, were lost in the waters of the English Channel – a chilling reminder of the human cost of this vile trade.”
Upon taking office earlier this month, Starmer immediately scrapped the long-delayed scheme to send illegal boat migrants to Rwanda and will reportedly fast-track the asylum requests of an estimated 90,000 illegals who were earmarked for removal to asylum processing centres in the African nation.
The previous Conservative governments behind the plan had claimed that immediately removing illegals to Rwanda would act as a deterrent for future crossings of the Channel. Indeed, migrants interviewed following the Labour Party’s victory at the general election earlier this month said that the new left-wing government’s decision to scrap the scheme made them more encouraged to come to Britain.
Despite first being put forward in 2022 by Boris Johnson, the Rwanda scheme never got off the ground as it was mired in legal challenges starting with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) — another technically separate institution from the EU — controversially intervening to block the first removal flight from departing to Rwanda in the summer of 2022.
On Thursday, Starmer told European leaders that his government would not leave the ECHR despite the Strasbourg-based court interfering in domestic British affairs.
Regardless of this overture to Europe — and the UK committing to send France half a billion pounds sterling to aid in cracking down on illegal migration — it appears that there is still little appetite on the continent for a policy of immediately returning illegals to the beaches of France, a policy which Paris claims would endanger migrants given that they have previously threatened to jump overboard into the water if authorities made efforts to push them back to the shore.
French President Emmanuel Macron said per The Telegraph: “It is obviously always a very delicate humanitarian situation so our willingness is constantly to improve the situation.”
“There is no silver bullet because we do know the situation. We do our best. We did improve the situation during the past few years,” he claimed, despite the number of migrant crossings increasing this year.