These bogus ‘rescues’ will end in tragedy

AND still it is falsely and inaccurately described as a ‘rescue’ when we help the criminal people-smugglers by ferrying their clients the last few miles to the British coast.

It is no such thing. It is official co-operation with a serious crime. The people smugglers count on us to do this, and deliberately use unseaworthy, dangerous craft to encourage it.

They also count on the witless media, who do and will fall for it. And when, as is bound to happen before long, some poor migrant child is drowned on some Kentish or Sussex beach, there will be a great storm of sentiment from the same quarter, in which those who wish to enforce our borders are blamed.

Before that storm breaks (by then it will be impossible to say this), I will make this point. If a British couple deliberately set out with their small children into rough winter seas by night in a small rubber dinghy, got into difficulties and were rescued by brave lifeboatmen, would there not be complaints that these fools had stupidly and irresponsibly risked the lives of their children and the life- boat crew? France may have its problems. As I have pointed out, the coffee isn’t up to much these days and the trains are not as good as they are cracked up to be. They even speak French, for goodness’ sake.

But it is not a genocidal tyranny and there is no famine there, so those who try to come illegally from there to here are not refugees. They are migrants. And there is a legal procedure for that.

This may be inconvenient, but it cannot possibly justify risking the life of a child.