THIS SQUALID MONUMENT TO FRANCE’S COWARDICE

The ‘Jungle’ camp at Calais is a squalid monument to europe’s failed border policies. In all its lawlessness, chaos and spirit of entitlement, it shows the political class in France lacks any real determination to sort out the problem.

Over recent years there have been several attempts, but none have been implemented with sufficient rigour or willpower to stop the return of the camp dwellers.

There was a much-trumpeted clearout in 2016, but, all too predictably, many are back, in swelling numbers.

It is estimated that there are now anything between 400 and 1,000 migrants around Calais in makeshift settlements, all eager to make their way to the promised land of Britain.

In the absence of anything like a sufficiently resolute approach, French politicians have resorted to their traditional strategy of heaping the blame on Britain. The air around the Channel is thick with Gallic demands for more support and more cash from our Government. Yesterday, before a British-French summit at Sandhurst, President emmanuel Macron visited Calais to highlight his administration’s call for the UK both to take in more refugees and to dish out more money for security at the port.

This French pressure comes laced with two forms of political blackmail. One is the far from subtle hint that, if Britain does not agree, then France will refuse to support a beneficial trade deal in the Brexit negotiations. The other is the threat to tear up the 2003 Le Touquet bilateral treaty – whereby British border controls were effectively moved to Calais to facilitate cross-Channel traffic – and move the border back to Britain.

But the French Government’s demands are not only profoundly unjust, they are also unworkable. Britain has already poured a fortune into beefing up security at Calais – over £120million in the past three years. Moreover, any transfer of the border to southern england would do nothing to stop the migrant problem at Calais. Indeed, it would almost certainly encourage migrants, bringing anarchy to north- eastern France and the entire cross-Channel system.

It is absurd of Macron and his allies to try to pass the buck. Calais is on French soil. The port’s security is the responsibility of French authorities, just as Dover is the responsibility of the British.

French politicians complain that the generosity of our welfare state to newcomers is a key factor in encouraging so many of the Calais migrants – most of them from Africa or Asia – to seek a new life in england. The beleaguered Calais mayor has even referred to the UK as ‘el Dorado’ because of the appeal of our social security system.

But this is double-speak. For the european Union, so beloved of the French ruling class, has made a fetish of the concept that no country’s welfare should discriminate against migrants.

When David Cameron, in his forlorn pre-referendum quest to establish a new relationship between the eU and Britain, urged a degree of reform in benefit rules, his request was dismissed by europe’s leaders.

The truth is that the Calais nightmare has been allowed to fester because of France’s political cowardice. There has never been a shred of justification for the camp dwellers to hang around the port, spreading misery and intimidation. None of them are genuine asylum seekers in flight from persecution. If they were, they would be grateful to settle in France. They are, in reality, economic migrants, cynically exploiting Western guilt for their own ends.

The Calais farce is a metaphor for a wider lack of political will to defend europe’s borders or the traditional concept of nationhood. The result is that ordinary people throughout europe are becoming deeply worried about migration’s effect on their culture, heritage and nationhood.

By focusing on the British over Calais, Macron is indulging in the politics of distraction. Immigration and a burgeoning migrant population are a source of deep discontentment and growing disunity in intensely nationalistic France, and he should put his own house in order before he points the finger at London.

The trouble is that he is too deeply marinated in the twin ideologies of globalism and eU integration, clinging to his emotive belief in open borders.

He

OPeNLY admires German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to open the floodgates in 2015 and welcome 1.5million incomers into her country. ‘We have to welcome refugees. It is our duty and our honour,’ he has declared.

Last July, when he proclaimed a clearout of tented camps, he said he wanted people ‘off the streets and out of the woods’. But, crucially, he added: ‘I want emergency shelters everywhere.’ Inevitably those shelters soon become new magnets for economic migrants.

The migration- fixated, diversityobsessed cadre of the eU, epitomised by Macron, have no answers to the problem of migrants. That is why the people of europe are so fed up, and why one French opinion poll found that 61 per cent of the population wants to suspend immigration from Muslim countries.

If Macron wanted to act, he could start by cracking down at Calais, rather than trying to palm it off as a British problem.