Migrant crossings of Channel top 40,000
The public has rightfully lost patience over failures to use Brexit to take back control of our borders
The number of Channel migrants reaching the UK has passed 40,000 in a single year for the first time, with Britain and France today poised to announce a new £63million deal to stop them. Nearly 2,000 crossed this weekend after more than a week when bad weather prevented attempts. The Ministry of Defence said 972 arrived on Saturday in 22 boats, taking the 2022 total to 40,885, over a third more than the 28,526 for the whole of 2021. A similar number crossed yesterday.
THE number of Channel migrants reaching the UK has passed 40,000 in a single year for the first time as Britain and France were today poised to announce a new £63million deal to curb the crossings.
Nearly 2,000 crossed on Saturday and Sunday in small boats after more than a week when bad weather prevented any migrants reaching the UK.
The Ministry of Defence (MOD) confirmed 972 arrived on Saturday in 22 boats, taking the 2022 total to 40,885, over one-third more than the 28,526 for the whole of 2021. A similar number are estimated to have crossed yesterday.
The surge will increase pressure on the Manston asylum processing centre in Kent, which became “chronically overcrowded” this month with more than 4,000 migrants on a site designed for 1,600. Numbers were reduced to just over 1,000 by the end of last week.
Britain and France are expected today to confirm an agreement under which the French will increase the number of gendarmes and volunteer officers on beach patrols from the cur- rent 200, with the aim of stopping more migrants leaving French shores.
The numbers could increase to 300 by the middle of next year. The deal will also see British immigration officers embedded in French control rooms so they can co-ordinate personnel and ves- sels to disrupt people smugglers.
The French have so far stopped around 29,000 migrants crossing this year – some 42 per cent of the total. Officials believe if that can be raised to 70 to 80 per cent, it could make the smugglers’ business model uneconomic.
Home office figures revealed more than 40,000 asylum seekers have been waiting between one and three years for a decision at a cost of more than £1billion to the taxpayer. A further 9,500 have been waiting three to five years, during which time the Government has had to pay for their accommodation and subsistence. Some 725 have been forced to wait more than five years, according to the data obtained under Freedom of Information laws.
All these people represent nearly 40 per cent of the total backlog of 122,206 cases, four times what it was just five years ago, with the taxpayer picking up a bill last year of £2.1billion to house people in hotels and other accommodation as well as feed them.
The Refugee Council which obtained the data said the resulting cost of the delays in processing claims and “untold human misery” that resulted from the waits was “unsustainable”. It urged the Government to set a target date for clearing the backlog, backed by adequate funding and prioritising sorting the claims of the most vulnerable. Of the 725 that have been waiting more than five years, 155 are children.
Enver Solomon, the Refugee Council’s chief executive, said: “Immediate action should be taken to address the huge backlog of men, women and children stuck in limbo while waiting years for a decision on their asylum claim, costing millions of pounds a day accommodating them in often poor quality hotels.
“These people came to the UK in search of safety, but they are being condemned to years of worry and uncertainty, with a grave toll on their mental health, instead of being able to put down roots in their new community and rebuild their lives.”
The asylum backlog has quadrupled in the past five years from 29,522 in December 2017 to 122,206 in June this year. This was a tenfold increase on the 12,808 cases a decade ago and double the number just 18 months ago.
For years politicians in Westminster have hoped that the British public would not notice the growing migration crisis on our southern borders. They relied on the polls that showed immigration falling down the ranks of voter concerns after the 2016 Brexit vote. Because for years the public believed that Brexit would mean we would take back control of our own borders – something that Boris Johnson and other Brexiteers promised with some regularity.
Well, it turned out that on the issue of illegal immigration, like so much of the post-brexit era, consecutive Conservative governments wasted time. They could have done what I and others argued for throughout. Which was withdrawal from any and all European conventions and treaties – including the ECHR – which stopped us being allowed to repel people coming into our country illegally. Dominic Raab intermittently applied himself to this question, coming up with a hodge-podge prototype British bill of rights that didn’t survive its first encounter with Parliament.
All the while the illegal immigration crisis grew. In 2018 the then home secretary Sajid Javid cut short his Christmas holidays to stare at the Channel and declare a national emergency over the arrival of a couple of hundred illegal migrants in the preceding months. Today a couple of hundred illegal migrants seem to cross the Channel every few hours.
The British public has woken up to this fact. A new poll out this week shows that up to 16 per cent of the public would be interested in backing a new political party led by Nigel Farage to address the issue. It is hardly surprising. The Conservative Party has left a huge gap in its political armour. And if Farage doesn’t take advantage of it, then someone should. The Tories never do anything Right unless it is forced to.
What could they do? They could ensure that British naval vessels stop assisting the people smuggling networks. At present our coastguard and others meet the boats that the gangs send out, greet the people mid-way and then bring them safely into Britain, where all of them will stay even if they commit further crimes. It is an exact replay of the mistakes the EU made which led to the migration crisis of 2015, a crisis I watched unfold first-hand and described in The Strange Death of Europe.
Watching the same mistakes play out here at home is tragic, and wholly avoidable. The previous Home Secretary, Priti Patel, nobly attempted to solve the dilemma by copying what our allies in Australia did a decade ago when they faced similar illegal flotillas. The Australians put the illegal migrants onto neutral territory where their claims could be very slowly processed. Among much else this proved a terrific deterrent. Today Australia does not have an illegal migration problem.
But when Patel announced her plan to offshore law-breakers to Rwanda, all hell broke loose among the liberal commentariat and grandstanding MPS of all parties. “I don’t want to live in a country which treats people like this”, they wailed. The Rwanda plan consisted of flying people who had broken our laws to a hotel in Rwanda with a swimming pool. If that is regarded as the height of barbarism these days then I would love to know what the lap of luxury might be.
The Patel plan was foiled because the rest of the government had failed to do what needed to be done on a legal level to stop so-called “human rights campaigners” effectively dictating UK immigration policy. All that is needed is withdrawal from the ECHR, the replacement of it with an almost precise replica of the rights afforded in it (so as not to overly spook the centrists) with minute alterations to the wording on illegal migration.
Yet this is a medium-term fix. The answer in the short term is to stop the boats. And to do this there are already existing laws. The thousands of Albanians who have broken into our country in the past year have already broken the law. All can be returned to Albania and should be. Albania is a safe country. To get here the migrants have come through safe country after safe country. So we should charter flights and fly them back – to a man. And it is, incidentally, almost all men. Do that and there will be a reason to vote Conservative again. Fail to do it, and the party deserves everything that will be coming to them.