Shameful pic of French cops watching migrants sail to Britain proves we've got to take action to stop small boats

The Sun

02-06-2025

SOMETIMES it takes a photograph to shift political debate.
Hopefully, one such image will be that of French border guards standing on a beach watching on as yet another boat-load of migrants set sail across the Channel in a dinghy, heading for sanctuary in soft-touch Britain.
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One of them seems even to be filming the occasion on his phone.
The boat load they were watching was just one of 19 which made it across the Channel on Saturday.
Between them, they carried 1,195 migrants, more than enough to fill yet one more migrant hotel.
In case anyone had forgotten, we British taxpayers have handed £480million over the past year to the French authorities supposedly to police the shores and prevent boats from setting off.
That was under a deal negotiated by former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in 2023, in which Britain agreed to fund a doubling in the number of French border control guards from 400 to 800.
Go through the motions
A more expensive and pointless job-creation scheme would be hard to imagine.
Since Britain agreed to cough up the money, the proportion of would-be migrants being intercepted before they reach UK waters has fallen from 46.9 percent in 2023 to 38 percent so far in 2025.
People-smugglers have got around the extra patrols by finding a new way to play the system: Rather than launch a boat- load of migrants directly from the beach they push the boats a few yards offshore and ask their clients to wade into the waters.
That, apparently, confounds the French border guards ' rules of engagement, hence they just stand and watch.
But let's be frank and ask: Do the French really have any intention of stopping these boats?
Starmer 'loses control' as over 1,000 migrants cross Channel in biggest daily total of 2025 – as French cops watch on
Needless to say, every migrant who leaves French territory is one fewer the French authorities have to worry about.
It makes perfect sense for the French to take our money and then go through the motions of pretending to stop migrants, while in practice letting them go.
If Emmanuel Macron 's government really wanted to stop the boats it could do so in an instant by doing a deal with Britain in which it agreed to the systematic return of every migrant who made it across the Channel.
If asylum seekers were obliged to do as international treaties supposedly insist they do, and make their claim in the first safe country in which they arrive, Channel crossings would all but cease.
Let's be frank and ask: Do the French really have any intention of stopping these boats?
There would no longer be any point in making a dangerous journey only to be shipped back immediately to France.
But of course France won't do that sort of deal because it doesn't want the burden of thousands of extra asylum seekers to process.
Meanwhile, our own government has thrown away the one tool which Sunak had painstakingly added to Britain's feeble border force armoury: The Rwanda scheme.
How foolish Labour's rejection of the scheme looks now.
Keir Starmer is now talking about a similar plan to process asylum claims in the Balkans, but sorry, it is too late.
Labour tries to claim the credit for a fall in overall net migration, which was entirely the result of visa changes by the Conservatives, while hoping we will somehow fail to notice the sharp rise in small- boat crossings since it came to power 11 months ago.
The Border Command which was supposed to tackle people-smugglers has proved to be a farce.
Since the election, 38,054 migrants have arrived by small boat, with numbers this year running ahead of any previous year.
The Rwanda scheme might have been expensive in terms of the cost per migrant, but that misses the point.
In practice, we may have ended up having to send rather few asylum seekers to Rwanda because migrants would have had such a disincentive to travel to Britain in the first place.
In the end we have the worst of all worlds.
We have more and more migrant arrivals while we are still picking up the tab for the abortive Rwanda scheme.
Paying dearly
Accommodation funded by us to house our asylum seekers now looks like being used by migrants sent there from other countries.
Nor has Starmer made use of another obvious piece of leverage.
Two weeks ago he renegotiated Britain's Brexit agreement, extending French fishing boats' access to UK waters without making it dependent on France putting a genuine effort into stopping the boats.
Why didn't he at least say: You can fish in British waters only if you agree to take back every single migrant who makes it illegally across the Channel?
As Kemi Badenoch said last week, every time Labour negotiates, Britain loses.
But then the previous Tory government hardly set an example, either, in handing France nearly half a billion a year to pretend to tackle illegal migration.
Truth is that we are all paying dearly for French border guards to stand around photographing the flotilla of migrant boats setting sail for Britain — and then again to feed and house the migrants once they arrive on our shores.