We CAN smash the smuggling gangs. But it’ll cost a lot of money... and pride
LAST week I visited an old colleague who now lives very close to the beaches where migrants come ashore, night and day, along the Channel coast. For her and her neighbours, it has now become usual, though it will never be normal.
She described to me the extraordinary shock of seeing large numbers of young men (most of them are young men), walking confidently ashore and sometimes moving on into the roads and private gardens of those who live close to the sea.
I spent a part of my childhood living very close to the south coast of this country, and I viewed the sea as a protection against the world beyond it. I had in my mind the history we used to be taught, about the Armada and Napoleon Bonaparte – and the much more recent history of the Second World War.
Nobody could come here unless we let them. It was a moat, not an open front door.
This has now changed for ever. People-smugglers have realised that the Channel is in fact very easy to cross. They are confident that no civilised, law-governed country can act effectively against migrants – once they have put to sea.
Mainly this crisis is the fault of the Blair Creature and his imitator David Cameron. With their halfwitted military adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, they began a colossal movement of economic migrants into Europe from Africa and the Middle East. This is now unlikely ever to stop, though crucially it can be prevented from continuing here.
Repeated schemes aimed at ending the arrival of such migrants in this country, from ‘pushback’ to exile in Rwanda, have pretty much come to nothing.
If things go on as they are, the machinery of the British state will simply become the servant of the migrants, lifting them from their dangerous dinghies and delivering them safely to our shores, where most of them will stay.
In fact, there is a remedy.
It is perfectly legal and totally practicable but it will cost us a lot of money and quite a bit of pride. We have to treat the Channel as if it was a land border with France, for it might as well be. And that means we must co-operate far more closely with France to keep it closed.
I will make myself unpopular here. Too bad. I rather admire the French. Yes, I can laugh at them as well, but despite all the jokes about ‘surrender monkeys’, they are a fierce and battle-hardened nation, especially under the right leadership. Look up the history of their defence of Verdun in 1916 if you doubt it. They have a powerful and pretty ruthless state machine, when they choose to use it.
They are very tough about protecting their interests, tougher than we are, often rightly refusing to be pushed about by the Americans. They are the only country in Europe which equals our record of surviving for so many centuries as an identifiable, continuous state and a serious power.
ITHINK we have to persuade them that it is in their interests as well as ours to ensure that migrants stop embarking from their shores and setting out into the Channel. Yes, this will involve a great deal of money, much more than we now spend, because a real effort to smash the smuggling rings for good will involve thousands of police over many months – and it will need to be maintained for a long time afterwards to make sure it does not revive.
But this will be real defence against an actual danger to our borders, not empty posturing. Look at what we are spending and have spent on two gigantic aircraft carriers, which still have no planes of their own and which conk out when they go to sea. Wouldn’t making our coast secure again be a better use of such money?
And it will involve a great deal of diplomacy, conducted by people who treat France’s leaders with respect in public and in private. Is that such a high price to pay for such a worthwhile aim? I do not think so.