Calais migrant crisis has already cost UK taxpayers over £360m
BRITISH taxpayers have forked out more than £360million on tackling the migrant crisis in Calais since 2010, it can be revealed today.
The £850,000 each week has been spent trying to stop tens of thousands of migrants sneaking into the UK from northern France.
The eye-watering total includes the £44.5million payment Prime Minister Theresa May yesterday gave to France’s President Emmanuel Macron to beef up security at UK border controls on the Continent.
But critics said the figure was actually a gross underestimate of the UK’s financial contribution to solving a problem which was created by the EU’s “open border” Schengen area.
Independent MEP Steven Woolfe said: “This is an absolute disgrace. The UK has gifted £360million but this is just the tip of the iceberg.
“The real cost of the UK’s contribution to protect the EU’s borders is much higher.
“We have contributed millions of pounds to programmes in Greece and Italy to protect the borders there, and we have given millions to Turkey to resettle economic migrants.”
Chaos
The overall cost to the UK is likely to be double or even quadruple the £850,000-a-week on the Calais crisis, he predicted.
Home Office figures obtained by this newspaper reveal that Britain stumped up £111.7million to secure the border at the height of the chaos in Calais in 2015-16, up from £48.8million in 2014-15.
The amount paid out since 2010 could have funded more than 15,000 new nurses.
British money has been used to install miles of high-security fencing around the besieged port and Eurotunnel terminals, £2million of which was used to erect a concrete barricade to stop migrants hijacking lorries on the N216 motorway.
The latest cash injection will fund “security fencing, CCTV and detection technology in Calais and other ports along the Channel” and stop the formation of another “Jungle” refugee camp, which at one time was home to 10,000 UK-bound migrants.
There are now thought to be close to 1,000 refugees living rough along the northern French coast.
An investigation by the Daily Express revealed a migrant was caught trying to sneak into Britain every 10 minutes between January 2016 and January 2017, with 56,132 attempts made – most through the migrant bottleneck of Calais.
Alp Mehmet, vice-chairman of Migration Watch UK, said: “These are huge amounts. Well done the Express for getting the facts. The taxpayer now wants to see it is money well spent, not good money after bad.”
Richard Burnett, chief executive of the Road Haulage Association, said: “We need a plan for tackling the situation, including a proper processing system in France to deal with migrants making asylum applications.
“Simply throwing more money at the problem won’t make it go away.”
Since October 2015, the UK has also allocated more than £175million in humanitarian assistance, including a three-year £75million programme to meet the “urgent humanitarian needs of migrants”.
A government spokesman said: “This is about investing in and enhancing the security of the UK border. Just as we invest in our borders in the UK it is only right we constantly monitor whether there is more we can be doing at UK border controls in France and Belgium.”
FRENCH President Emmanuel Macron’s offer of the Bayeux Tapestry coming to England for the first time in 940 years is a timely reminder of what happened the last time we were overwhelmed by illegal immigrants.
After the defeat at the battle of Hastings in 1066 the unwelcome continental invaders wreaked havoc and slaughter, stealing land and property from the English and distributing it to their followers.
More significant was the impact on our native culture, sweeping aside the long-established Anglo-Saxon civilisation to the extent that French replaced English as the language of discourse among the ruling elite for hundreds of years afterwards.
Ever since we joined the EU, Britain has been faced by a similar challenge to our traditional way of life with our laws drafted by continental bureaucrats and judgments handed down by foreign courts. A French-speaking elite has never had more influence over our day-to-day lives since King Harold got an arrow in the eye at Hastings.
This radical transformation of Britain has only increased since Tony Blair and the Labour Party opened the door to unrestricted mass migration, rapidly growing our population to the point where we can barely cope with the pressure on our public services.
Thank God Brexit allowed us to fight a re-run of Hastings and regain control of our lives and institutions from mainland Europe. Someone should commission a 75-yard long embroidery recording the events of the Brexit campaign with a mail-clad Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson charging to victory, cutting down the Brussels bureaucrats.
MACRON may come bearing gifts but he also wants to see us taking in more migrants, especially so-called “unaccompanied minors”. These include the 30-year-old blokes who claim to be vulnerable teenagers. In Germany tens of thousands of these fake “minors” have duped the authorities and some of them have committed a string of brutal crimes.
One headlining story tells of an adult refugee from Iraq claiming to be 12, placed in a German school, who then proceeded to terrorise the children and sell them drugs.
He claimed he was behaving this way because he’d been traumatised by the bombing of his old school. The over-age minor was only finally arrested by the German authorities because he joined the terrorist organisation IS with his father. Apparently testing the age of any such supposed child migrants in Germany is an infringement of their human rights.
Taking back control of our borders means standing firm against any more requests for bogus refugees to be imposed on us. Hungary’s defiant leader Viktor Orban is overseeing new laws to ensure that migrants are not imposed on his country by EU quotas – so we are not alone.
Rather than asking us to take more illegal immigrants, France should spend more money on stemming the flow across its southern borders and processing them so they can be sent back to their lands of origin before they even reach Calais. Too often we hear of French authorities waving on economic migrants towards Britain.
The price of Macron’s Bayeux Tapestry “gift” may well be the extra £45million we are being asked to spend on tightening border defences at Calais but that is no bad thing as we can make sure this remains a strong bulwark against the waves of mass migration coming our way.
A positive result of May’s meeting with Macron is a pledge of further military support to each other. Britain and France are by far the most militarily competent and experienced of all nations in Europe and continue to hold the frontline against Islamist terrorism around the world.
Such bilateral agreements will become an increasingly important part of our dealings with leading nations after Brexit as we will no longer be shackled by the EU.
As for Macron wanting to drain thousands of jobs away from the City of London to Paris, good luck with that, Monsieur. Paris is a beautiful city but it remains resolutely “French”, frequently paralysed by strikes, whereas London continues to be dominant as an international city of business.
Macron may well be wanting to reform decades of stultifying French socialism but London post-Brexit will be even more attractive to world investors and should not shy away from stealing a competitive advantage by providing tax incentives to encourage this.
THE wily French President may well have been trying to make a clunky political point by reminding us of an English defeat by France but that was a millennium ago and we’ve been thrashing them ever since.
Still, just as Trump is putting America first, so Macron is putting France first and we should be doing the same.
Brexit has given us the opportunity to regain our national pride and become the global leaders we have been ever since we defeated Napoleon at Waterloo.
But out of politeness we should park that historical reference to one side and enjoy gazing at a medieval tapestry that reminds us that the last time the French gained the upper hand over us in an international conflict they were wearing chainmail and shooting bows and arrows.
‘Macron wants UK to take more migrants’