Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Migrants ‘deserve to have respect’
MIGRANTS “deserve to be treated with compassion and respect”, Downing Street stressed, after a Home Office minister criticised the “cheek” of complaints from people arriving in the country “illegally” about processing centre conditions.
No 10 appeared to distance itself from comments made by Chris Philp amid overcrowding chaos at the Manston holding centre in Kent, where at one point as many as 4,000 people were being detained for weeks in a site intended to hold 1,600 for a matter of days.
It comes as immigration minister Robert Jenrick was heckled by some residents visiting Dover with the town’s MP Natalie Elphicke and dodged questions from the press.
Meanwhile councils have expressed concern over the number of asylum seekers being housed in hotels in their districts by the Home Office, with two more preparing to take the companies involved to court.
Close to 40,000 migrants have arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel so far this year. But no crossings have been recorded by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) over the last three days. The provisional total to date for 2022 is 39,913.
Mr Philp had told Times Radio: “If people choose to enter a country illegally, and unnecessarily, it is a bit, you know, it’s a bit of a cheek to then start complaining about the conditions when you’ve illegally entered a country without necessity.” But when asked if Mr Philp was speaking for the Government, Rishi Sunak’s official spokesman said: “I haven’t spoken to the Prime Minister about that specifically. Certainly it is true that Home Office border force officials and many others are working hard to provide safe, secure accommodation for those individuals that come via these routes.
“As we’ve been clear, those individuals deserve to be treated with compassion and respect. Obviously the current approach is not working and it is placing huge pressures – both in terms of on the Government and on the local area – and that is presenting significant challenges, which is why we continue to work both with French colleagues and more broadly to try and resolve this issue.”
Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Alistair Carmichael said Mr Philp’s comments “reveal a shocking and callous complacency over the disaster unfolding at Manston”.
North Thanet MP Sir Roger Gale told the PA news agency he could see where Mr Philp was “coming from” in respect to people “perfectly capable of fending for themselves” crossing the Channel to the UK. But he said in his opinion it is not a “cheek” to say children and women should be “treated humanely”.
On Thursday, Government minister Graham Stuart conceded Manston was not operating legally and “none of us are comfortable with it”, but sought to blame an “unacceptable surge” in small boat crossings for the problem, adding that the “system is struggling to cope”.