If the events of yesterday show anything it is that France doesn’t want to stop the boats and the French state is now little more than a smuggling gang, says Patrick O’Flynn in the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt.
Amid all the hand-wringing about the latest deaths of migrants in the Channel, you should keep one essential point in mind: France doesn’t want to stop the boats.
How, you might ask, can I be so sure of this, when by all accounts patrols of the French coastline by police and border guards have been stepped up in the past few months and officers have on occasion even been filmed puncturing dinghies?
The answer is that if it wished to, France could stop all the boats – and rid its coastal communities of the scourge of ramshackle migrant camps too – with almost zero cost or administrative burden by implementing one simple measure.
All it would have to do is issue a statement saying it would accept back to its shores any migrant boat intercepted by Royal Navy, U.K. Border Force or RNLI vessels. Then Britain could do the rest.
Our surveillance techniques – including the use of drones – have become so sophisticated over recent years that almost every migrant dinghy is detected well before it enters UK waters. We intercept virtually every boat, and bring them to our shores.
But if France said it would take them back, we could steam them over to Calais every time. And no migrant would pay £3,000 to a people-trafficker for the dubious privilege of spending a couple of hours in the middle of the Channel before ending back where they started.
The migrant camps would swiftly disappear, too, as there would be no incentive for irregular migrants to trek to the coast of northern France. The whole gate-crashers’ ball would be over: no more boats, no more deaths, no more English hotels rammed with illegal immigrants.
Yet France has repeatedly refused to do this, instead preferring to take regular and large payments from the U.K. taxpayer in order to enact the theatre of attempting law-enforcement along the long stretch of relevant shoreline.
Of course, migrant boats are sometimes intercepted before entering the water, sometimes disabled. But an expensive policy that is at best 10% effective is being implemented while a cheap one that would be 100% effective is blocked.
This can only be because France does not actually wish to spare the U.K. from sharing in the pain of Europe’s irregular migration crisis.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.