Calais mess has our politicians in a spin

StUNG by criticism of Friday’s feeble ‘sticking plaster’ response to the Calais illegal immigrant crisis, the Government spent the weekend frantically churning out announcements.

an unspecified number of extra private security guards to be sent to France … more lighting and CCTV cameras … restrictions on the handouts given to failed asylum seeker families in the UK…

today’s headline-grabbing offering is a promise of jail sentences for rogue landlords who repeatedly take in people with no right to be in Britain.

Of course, such measures are welcome – but nobody should pretend they are anything more than minor tinkering.

the asylum handouts plan, a variation on an old policy, applies only to people with children.

It will make no difference to the hordes of single men laying siege to the Channel tunnel every night – as many as 70 per cent of whom, as we report today, police believe are getting through.

Meanwhile, the landlord crackdown, while packaged as a response to Calais, was first promised in the Queen’s Speech two months ago.

as for theresa May’s warning that ‘our streets are not paved with gold’?

tell that to the stowaways who, upon being picked up in England last week, were immediately put up in hotels with gyms and swimming pools by the home Office and given £35 a week spending money!

For barefaced cheek, however, look no further than harriet harman, who spent the weekend lambasting ministers for their lame response to a crisis which she claimed the Labour Party had long predicted.

Labour didn’t predict this mess – it caused it, over the course of 13 disastrous years in power, by systematically dismantling our border controls and turning ‘soft touch’ Britain into the world’s most powerful magnet for illegal immigration.