"What could they do? They could ensure that British naval vessels stop assisting the people smuggling networks. At present our coastguard and others meet the boats that the gangs send out, greet the people mid-way and then bring them safely into Britain, where all of them will stay even if they commit further crimes. It is an exact replay of the mistakes the EU made which led to the migration crisis of 2015, a crisis I watched unfold first-hand and described in
The Strange Death of Europe.
Watching the same mistakes play out here at home is tragic, and wholly avoidable. The previous Home Secretary, Priti Patel, nobly attempted to solve the dilemma by copying what our allies in Australia did a decade ago when they faced similar illegal flotillas. The Australians put the illegal migrants onto neutral territory where their claims could be very slowly processed. Among much else this proved a terrific deterrent. Today Australia does not have an illegal migration problem.
But when Patel announced her plan to
offshore law-breakers to Rwanda, all hell broke loose among the liberal commentariat and grandstanding MPs of all parties. “I don’t want to live in a country which treats people like this”, they wailed. The Rwanda plan consisted of flying people who had broken our laws to a hotel in Rwanda with a swimming pool. If that is regarded as the height of barbarism these days then I would love to know what the lap of luxury might be.
The Patel plan was foiled because the rest of the government had failed to do what needed to be done on a legal level to stop so-called “human rights campaigners” effectively dictating UK immigration policy. All that is needed is withdrawal from the ECHR, the replacement of it with an almost precise replica of the rights afforded in it (so as not to overly spook the centrists) with minute alterations to the wording on illegal migration.
Yet this is a medium-term fix. The answer in the short term is to stop the boats. And to do this there are already existing laws. The thousands of Albanians who have broken into our country in the past year have already broken the law. All can be returned to Albania and should be. Albania is a safe country. To get here the migrants have come through safe country after safe country. So we should charter flights and fly them back – to a man. And it is, incidentally, almost all men."
Polls show the public has rightfully lost patience over failures to use Brexit to take back control of our borders. A reckoning will follow
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