NICK FERRARI Time to cut French border farce adrift
The only “smart” motorways are those with a hard shoulder. Others are merely death traps.
COUNCILLORS in Kent are looking to introduce a “tourist tax”.thanet District Council says it will help cover the costs of handling visitors to Margate, and cities such asvenice and Lisbon are cited as destinations where this has worked. Margate may offer a jolly seafront, but the last thing it needs is a disincentive to visit.
THERE’LL surely be a welcome in the valleys at the news the Labour-run Welsh government is to revise the blanket imposition of a 20mph speed limit on hundreds of roads and streets. But if Labour can’t get the speed limits right, can they really be expected to be able to run the United Kingdom?
AT FIRST it was almost comical. The usual “haven’t got a Clouseau” French bumbling you might associate with the Pink Panther movies. But it was only when the tragedy reached its climax that you realised the criminal incompetence displayed by the French authorities has had fatal consequences. Five people, including a seven-year-old girl, lost their lives on a perilously overloaded migrant inflatable boat after panic broke out when its engine failed a few hundred yards from the shore and it appeared to be stranded on a sandbank.
Unbelievably, while 48 migrants waded to the safety off the Plage des Allemands near Boulogne in the early hours of Tuesday morning, French police and border officers watched as the remaining 58 headed off. Later they were “escorted” by the French navy until they reached British waters, when they were handed over.
In truth, that blatant disregard for migrants’ safety was only to be expected as the very same supposed officers had done little more than escort them along the beach in the first place, having backed off after people smugglers threatened them with large sticks or poles and threw firecrackers at them.
While nothing comes close to the human cost of this appalling tragedy, this is a little over a year after the United Kingdom pledged to send hundreds of millions of pounds to Paris to bolster up border security.
That’s right.
PM Rishi Sunak stood alongside French President Emmanuel Macron and promised £500million of taxpayers’ money over three years to boost the French authorities’ efforts to stop the small boat crossings.
And last week we witnessed the lamentable extent of those supposed efforts.
On a policing level, surely the boat and all the passengers should have been impounded on the spot as people had died and it was therefore a potential crime scene?
And on a human level, having seen people lose their lives and others swim or scramble to safety, where was the compassion to prevent more loss of life?
Commenting on the horrific events, the Prime Minister said it underscored the need for his Rwanda solution to commence – although it’s fair to say it’s not easy to see how the numbers add up regarding that.
Even if the scheme does “take off”, the number of people likely to be settled is in the hundreds. Meanwhile, 4,664 people have successfully crossed the channel in the first three months of this year – a record.
The British government must suspend this financial French Connection – their “border force” is little more than a total farce.
ANOTHER week and another set of statistics questioning the decision to impose Covid lockdowns on this country for as long and as draconically as we did.
Figures from the start of the pandemic – March 2020 – revealed 10,048 people died due to alcohol-related illnesses, an increase of 33 per cent on the preceding time period.
Among middleaged women it was even more grave, the figure grew by 48 per cent.
Locked up in virtual prison conditions, one glass of wine became a bottle and many didn’t wait until
5pm for their “Quarantinis”.
So long as it was five o’clock somewhere, that was good enough.
Meanwhile, 120,000 children vanished from the school lists, many of them never to return even to this day. And we also learnt many of that cohort are in line for the worst GCSE results in years.
There was no lockdown whatsoever in Sweden, and their death rate is among the lowest in the world and their educational attainment continues to rise.
This wretched lockdown legacy will dog us for many, many years.
WHILE wishing neither humans nor equines any harm, I can’t help but wonder how any Just Stop Oil or Extinction Rebellion protester might have reacted if they’d glued themselves to the road and saw two cavalry horses galloping towards them at full pelt!