This Dad’s Army approach won’t secure our coast

The use of boats to traffic migrants was predictable – and our Government has been woefully ill-prepared

Retaking control of our borders was one of the key factors that led so many Britons to vote for Brexit. So it must be a source of profound concern for Brexit campaigners that, when faced with their first major migrant crisis since the referendum, the British authorities have been reduced to adopting an approach more suited to Dad’s Army.

It is not as though the appearance of migrant boats in the Channel is some new phenomenon that has suddenly arisen while ministers were enjoying the festive break. For the better part of a decade, thousands of refugees from areas of the globe afflicted by poverty and conflict have been congregating on the northern coast of France in the hope of making a better life for themselves in Britain.

Previous efforts to prevent this desperate tide of humanity from sweeping into Britain have concentrated on improving the security arrangements around key French ports such as Calais, where the primary focus of the occupants of the various migrant camps established around the town’s perimeter was to gain illegal entry to Britain by clambering on to the Eurostar or British-bound lorries.

Consequently, that route is now all but closed to migrants, forcing them to search for new ways of reaching their chosen destination. And, with all other means of transportation denied to them, it should hardly come as a surprise to British officials that the migrants should seek to make the Channel crossing by boat.

After all, making hazardous sea crossings in distinctly unsuitable craft has been one of the more alarming features of the migrant crisis that has affected the entire European continent since the start of the decade.

A significant majority of the hundreds of thousands of migrants who have sought to make their way from the littorals of the eastern and northern Mediterranean to the European Union’s primary entry points in Greece and Italy have done so by risking their lives in boats that are totally unsuited for such enterprises. One of the main factors in their decision to do so has been the closure of the less challenging land routes into the EU through the Balkans and eastern Europe.

Thus, once the Calais-based migrant communities were denied access to the more attractive methods of entering Britain by train or lorry, it was only a matter of time before they adopted the same tactics employed in Turkey and Libya, and tried to achieve their objective by sea.

And yet, despite the fact that British border and police officials have been involved in all aspects of Europe’s migrant crisis from its outset, they appear to have been caught completely off-guard by the sudden appearance of numerous migrant craft attempting to make the treacherous Channel crossing to southern England.

It was not until the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, was persuaded to return from his holiday at a luxurious South African safari resort that the Government started to display any serious interest in getting on top of this wholly predictable development.

Following emergency meetings with senior officials at the Border Force and National Crime Agency, Mr Javid has now announced that he will be adding two more cutters in support of HMC Searcher, the only Border Force vessel currently dealing with the migrant issue in the Channel.

But not even Mr Javid’s belated display of enthusiasm for arresting the flow of illegal migrants to our southern shores can excuse the level of rank incompetence so far shown by those responsible for protecting the British coastline.

At the same time that Mr Javid was seeking to reassure the public that he had matters under control, The Daily Telegraph revealed that HMC Searcher had been safely tied up at her berth in Ramsgate for two days, thereby making no contribution whatsoever to the operation to disrupt illegal smuggling operations. Moreover, neither of the two cutters Mr Javid is redeploying from their current operations in the Mediterranean to deal with illegal migrants in the Channel will be available to contribute to operations for at least another week.

This is indeed a lamentable state of affairs, particularly, with the Brexit deadline fast approaching, as this is a moment when the Government should be demonstrating its ability to police our coastline.

The whole point of people voting for Britain to take back control of its borders was that, in future, it would be the British government, and not a bunch of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, that would be responsible for who could, and who could not, gain entry to Britain.

Yet, when faced with its first major illegal migration challenge since the referendum, the Government has shown itself woefully ill-prepared to deal with such an eventuality.

Hopefully, ministers will learn some important lessons from this fiasco, not least that the British authorities have a fundamental duty to ensure we have the appropriate resources in place post-brexit to protect Britain’s southern shoreline from boatloads of illegal migrants.

READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion