Does Boris Johnson care about the increasing numbers of migrants who are risking their lives by crossing the English Channel — and putting enormous pressure on our hard-pressed social services if they succeed?
Nearly six times more migrants crossed the border last month than in October 2020.
The journey was completed by 2,669 people, many of them in small boats. It was completed by 1,185 migrants in a single day, while more than 1000 did it the next week.
Three people have died while trying to cross Channel waters.
Come to that, an estimated 300 people have died doing so over the past two decades, most of whom had put themselves in the hands of unscrupulous ‘people smugglers’.
Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is seen leaving Downing Street Wednesday as more migrants arrive in the UK through the English Channel.
Home Secretary Priti Patel described the asylum system as ‘dysfunctional’ on Tuesday following the Liverpool hospital terror attack
Emad al Swealmeen died on Sunday when his bomb exploded outside a Liverpool Hospital. This case highlights the problems of asylum seekers who have failed to return home and may be a danger to the general public.
He was not allowed to apply for a visa, but he still had his passport.
Priti Patel, who has been Home Secretary for two years and four months, described the asylum system as ‘dysfunctional’ on Tuesday, as though it was nothing to do with her.
She blames ‘a whole professional legal services industry’ for what she describes as ‘a complete merry-go-round’.
It is possible she also mentioned the Church of England which, according to some reports, has converted many Muslim asylum seekers into Christianity.
It appears that embracing Christianity significantly increases the chances of a migrant being given asylum — and decreases the likelihood of being sent back to an Islamic country.
Rejection
However, the odds of this happening are not high. 12.552 asylum-seekers who failed to return home in 2012 were returned to their homeland.
Last year, it was just 1,484.
If you make it across the Channel, you’ll probably be able to stay, even if you are supposed to go.
This is an extremely serious situation that is certain to worsen as more people attempt to cross the 21 miles that divide Britain and France.
You could also argue that refugees who come here to seek asylum should be openly welcomed.
Emad Al-Swealmeen 32 has been identified as being the perpetrator of the terror attack on the entrance to a Liverpool hospital just before 11am Sunday
The Refugee Council believes in this position and seeks to help refugees.
Yesterday morning, the BBC baldly reported that the Refugee Council disputed Priti Patel’s recent claim that 70 per cent of arrivals are ‘economic migrants’.
The rejection was quoted like Holy Writ. The Refugee Council clearly was correct, but Ms Patel & the Home Office were evidently wrong.
But the Refugee Council’s ‘research’ was little more than an assertion.
Enver Solomon, its chief executive, avers: ‘The reality is that people who come to the UK by taking terrifying journeys in small boats across the Channel do so because they are desperately seeking safety having fled persecution, terror and oppression’.
He’s only partly right. In any case, these people shouldn’t be trying to force their way into the UK.
By the way, the last time I looked, France — where such people are entitled to stay — was not a centre for persecution, terror and oppression.
We can’t pin that particular charge on President Emmanuel Macron.
No, I believe most British people, while properly sympathetic to true refugees and aware of our human obligations towards them, don’t take the view of the Refugee Council (and apparently the BBC) that virtually anyone who turns up on the English coast should have an automatic right of residence.
I also suggest that there are many like me who are baffled by the Government’s unwillingness or failure to establish control of our borders, which in my naivety I had thought was one of the main purposes of Brexit.
Baffled
Indeed, according to a substantial poll of 12,369 voters on June 23, 2016 (the day of the Referendum) one third ranked regaining ‘control over immigration and [the UK’s] borders’ as the main reason for voting to leave the EU.
Many Remainers supported controlling immigration.
Recent surveys have shown that 44% of respondents want it to decrease and 39% think the current level is acceptable.
Another poll in the same year — when numbers crossing the Channel were much smaller than they are now, and the crisis was less acute — revealed that nearly half of respondents had little or no sympathy for asylum seekers entering the UK by that route, with only 19 per cent having ‘a great deal of sympathy’.
This week, migrants arrived in Kent via boat crossing the English Channel.
Boris Johnson or Priti Patel would be supported by the majority if they fulfilled their pledge to control our borders and tried to stop asylum seekers.
The BBC, which largely ignores the influx, or sides with the Refugee Council, isn’t reflecting public opinion.
Why doesn’t the Government get a grip? No one should question Priti Patel’s desire to act. It is not easy to see that she talks hard, but then she switches from one strong, sometimes even rigid, policy to the next without actually achieving anything.
In January 2020 she threatened to send all gang-smuggled people back home to their origins.
No migrants have yet been returned to France. Only five of the more than 23,000 migrants that arrived by boat in France this year have been sent back to Europe.
Fire-breathing Home Secretary, May 2020, vowed that migrants boats would be returned to France by the fire-breathing home secretary even if they are in British waters.
Paris and the UK have not yet reached an understanding. The UK Border Force ships entered French waters last June to assist a boat carrying migrants to Dover.
Emmanuel Macron, French president. Paris and Paris have not come to an agreement on the return of migrants
It’s true that the Nationality and Borders Bill is wending its way through Parliament.
Although it contains sensible measures such as tougher punishments for people smugglers. Few believe that this will alter much.
The Bill does not contain any provisions to establish an offshore processing center for asylum seekers.
Although the Home Office proposed the creation of such a system last July in collaboration with Denmark in Rwanda, legal and practical objections have been deemed almost impossible.
Anxiety
It is clear that counting on France to limit numbers is futile. Despite being handed tens of millions of pounds by the Government, the French authorities either can’t make much difference, or won’t.
It is clear that the UK Government faces an immense challenge. I’m not at all sure whether, with her penchant for threats she doesn’t carry out, Priti Patel is the best minister to be in charge. The Prime Minister needs to give her more support,
This brings me to my next question: Does Boris actually care?
Four days after the EU Referendum, he wrote a column in the Daily Telegraph in which he doubted whether ‘those who voted Leave were mainly driven by anxieties about immigration’.
But lots of people do care — most especially Brexit supporters and Tory voters, not least those in the ‘Red Wall’.
Boris Johnson would do well to consider a crisis, which could lead into a disaster, more seriously.