AN AWFUL HUMAN TRAGEDY
more British patrols on French soil. After chairing a Cobra meeting the prime minister said: ‘The operation being conducted by our friends on the beaches, supported as you know with £54million from the UK, the technical support we’ve been giving, hasn’t been enough.
‘Our offer is to increase our support but also to work together with our partners on the beaches concerned, on the launching grounds for these boats.
‘That’s something I hope will be acceptable now in view of what has happened because there is no doubt the gangs concerned will continue to deceive people, to put people’s lives at risk and to get away with murder.’
Natalie Elphicke, Conservative MP for Dover, who wants joint patrols in France, said: ‘In winter the sea is rougher, the water colder, the risk of even more lives tragically being lost greater. Stopping these dangerous crossings is the humanitarian and right thing to do.’
But Calais MP Pierre-Henri Dumont rejected joint patrols ‘because of the question of sovereignty’. He also said France should move migrants from the coast to the centre of the country.
Home Office minister Chris Philp insisted: ‘This is an awful human tragedy, especially as France is a safe country and the journey across the Channel therefore unnecessary. French law enforcement must stop these crossings.’
But Mr Johnson also faced calls for Britain to open up safer asylum routes.
Campaigners say that would stop criminal gangs charging around £3,000 per person to cross illegally by sea.
British Red Cross chief executive Mike Adamson said: ‘Nobody puts their life at risk unless they’re absolutely desperate and feel they have no other options.’
Almost 26,000 migrants have made the treacherous Channel crossing in 2021 – more than treble last year’s total of 8,417. Britain received 26,903 asylum applications in the year to March – France’s 93,475 was second in the EU only to Germany’s 122,015.
Channel 4 News had been filming a report at Wimereux when the Kurdish migrants ran down a beach as officials watched them launch a ‘super dinghy’.
Presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy last night asked the mayor of nearby SaintOmer François Decoster: ‘Why are the police not stopping them? We have seen people on the beaches getting into these boats and police doing nothing.’ The mayor replied: ‘We are stopping people every day.’
French president Emmanuel Macron called for an emergency meeting of European leaders, vowing: ‘France will not let the Channel become a cemetery.’