ANOTHER day, another dismal set of numbers from our worsening immigration crisis in the Channel.
Shockingly, as of today, a total of 9,099 migrants have entered Britain illegally in 162 small boats this year.
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That’s up 45 per cent on the same time last year and up 81 per cent on the same time in 2023. And remember: we’re not even in the hot summer months yet.
The small boats crisis is getting worse, not better, as anybody who has bothered to visit Dover and watch the boats arrive, as I have done, knows all too well.
In fact, I’ve yet to meet anybody working on the border who thinks the Labour government’s “plan” for stopping the boats is working.
Why? Because we have no active deterrent to discourage the migrants from coming.
Our leaders, meanwhile, refuse to leave the European Convention on Human Rights and reform the Human Rights Act, both of which are essential to helping us control our borders and deport foreign criminals.
A total mockery
And because we offer illegal migrants endless welfare when they get here — from cash cards and healthcare to shiny hotel rooms and new phones — they just keep on coming.
Even the French say we have become a “soft touch” — and it’s not often I find myself agreeing with the French.
The key point in all this is that it’s making a total mockery of our claim to be a self-governing, sovereign nation that is keeping its own people safe and secure.
A nation that cannot control its borders is not a serious nation, and a country that has no idea who is coming in or out is not a serious country.
While Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper claim they are “smashing the gangs”, the only thing they are smashing is our border security and the British people’s sense of fair play — namely that when you come to this country you must play by the rules.
Today, our politicians are more interested in helping the migrants who break our laws than the hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding British people.
And, once again, it’s the British people who are having to foot the bill — paying upwards of £5million every day on hotels and accommodation for illegal migrants and upwards of £7BILLION every year on this fiasco.
How many police officers, nurses, winter fuel payments, and tax breaks for British family farms would that cover, I wonder?
‘Return hubs’
All this might be why, if you believe the rumours in the newspapers this week, Starmer and Cooper could at least be starting to come to their senses.
Apparently, Labour is plotting a major U-turn by planning to deport failed asylum-seekers to so-called “return hubs” in the Balkans, a plan that appears to have won support from the United Nations’ refugee agency.
The idea has no doubt been shaped by the so-called “Blue Labour” wing of the Labour Party that understands what is glaringly obvious to everybody else in this country — that unless the border crisis is resolved quickly then it could easily blow this Labour government apart, much like the failure to control our borders helped demolish the Tories at the General Election last year.
There’s no doubt that Labour’s latest plan marks a response to the seemingly relentless rise of Nigel Farage and Reform UK
Matt Goodwin
Under Labour’s new plan, which Westminster insiders are misleadingly calling a “game-changer”, British taxpayers would fund countries in the Balkans to take in failed asylum-seekers.
That’s right — the same Labour Party that had a moral panic and meltdown about deporting the illegal migrants who break our laws to Rwanda is now exploring deporting them to . . . the Balkans.
Furthermore, it’s the very same UN High Commission For Refugees that worked against the Rwanda scheme in 2023 that is now endorsing a very similar scheme to deport migrants elsewhere. Funny how things change, eh? And they’re not the only ones.
Across Europe, from Germany to Italy, panicking liberal elites are exploring similar deportation deals to try to fend off not just a rising tide of millions of illegal migrants from Africa and the Middle East but rapidly rising public support for anti-immigration populists.
Here in Britain, there’s no doubt that Labour’s latest plan marks a response to the seemingly relentless rise of Nigel Farage and Reform UK, with polling this week in The Sun shockingly putting Reform ahead of Labour across the Red Wall.
I saw this on the ground in Labour-held Runcorn and Helsby this week, where there is a crunch by-election on May 1.
Everywhere I went, people wanted to talk about the few hundred illegal migrants who were staying in a local hotel and the many more living in “HMOs” — houses in multiple occupation.
Astonishingly, I saw one three-bedroom house with 20 migrants living in it while one local mother came up and told me she is now too afraid to let her children play out at night.
Too afraid
So if Reform wins here it will be another sign that our immigration crisis is handing Nigel Farage and Reform the keys to Labour’s Red Wall.
But will Labour’s latest plan actually work? I’m sceptical, to be honest.
Because the key word in all this is the deportation of “failed” asylum-seekers.
While Labour sources are saying their plan will deport asylum-seekers who failed to win asylum, the blunt reality is that, under Labour, the Home Office is already approving the vast majority of asylum claims.
This is one big reason why so many illegal migrants are still coming — because they know that if they land on Britain’s beaches then at least two-thirds of their asylum claims will be approved.
So until we change that reality and toughen up the asylum process, more and more of these people will just keep on coming.
And the more of them who arrive, the greater the chances that this Labour government, like the one before it, will soon implode under the growing weight of public outrage and concern over what on earth is happening to our once great country.
LAST week the Home Office blocked the French novelist and critic of mass immigration, Renaud Camus, from entering Britain on the grounds that his presence would “not be conducive to the public good”.
Camus is most well-known for having coined the phrase “great replacement”, which refers to the way in which, he believes, the peoples of Europe are being replaced by mass immigration and Islam.
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While many people will find his arguments controversial and perhaps disagreeable, his exclusion from even entering Britain does raise some big questions and, some might say, is rather hypocritical.
Why, for example, are we blocking a French novelist who advocates alternative right-wing views while allowing Syrian terrorists to remain in the country?
Why are we blocking this man while allowing anti-Semites to march through London? Are they “conducive to the public good”?
Why are Labour MPs who recently made a big stink when two of their own were blocked from entering Israel – arguing they held “legitimate views” – not kicking off about Camus being blocked?
And where does all this leave our increasingly invisible free speech in modern Britain?