Stopping illegal migrants crossing the Channel isn’t just a question of proper border control—it’s a question of life and death.
The establishment’s total failure to deter the perilous crossings—and their occasional success in actually incentivising them—yesterday resulted in the deadliest Channel disaster so far this year.
At least 12 migrants died after their dinghy “ripped open” and sank mid-crossing. And while more than 80% of those who cross annually are male, ten of those on board yesterday were female, including a pregnant woman and six children.
More than 60 migrants were on the small vessel, which set off in rough seas, with a 17-knot wind, on Tuesday morning. Many of those rescued by French border officials required emergency treatment.
Not that any of this put a new group of migrants off from attempting the crossing today, joining the more than 21,000 people who have already crossed this year.
“Death,” after all, “is part and parcel of the illegal migration trade,” said Dr. Mike Jones of the Migration Watch UK think tank in response to this latest tragedy.
And it is part and parcel too of the lax laws in Europe that encourage these people to cross in the first place.
Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice added that he was “absolutely sick with fury and rage” of the “bleating and whining” from “do good bodies who say we need more safe and legal routes” when in fact,
The only way the deaths will stop … is if you pick up and take back.
Meanwhile, France has laid the blame squarely on the UK. On a visit to the harbour in Boulogne on Tuesday, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin called the UK a country “where you can work without papers and where you have little chance of being expelled.”
He called on the UK government to negotiate a new post-Brexit migration treaty with the European Union.
These people want to go to Great Britain. And it is not the tens of millions of euros that we negotiate each year with our British friends, and who only pay a third of what we spend, that will put an end to illegal departures.
Rather than commit to doing this, the new Labour government has instead kept quiet while thousands of migrants have crossed under its watch—preferring to focus on the gangs behind the movement, instead—and has even given up on correctly labelling these crossings as “illegal.”
There is, as such, “blood on the hands of the government,” raged Tice.
Labour Home Secretary Yvette Cooper responded to the deaths by describing them as “horrifying and deeply tragic,” and said, “We will await the results of the French investigation into how this particular incident unfolded.”
