In a 24-hour period at the weekend, 184 migrants were rescued in the English Channel by the French coastguard. The most southerly group that got into trouble was picked up off Fort-Mahon in the Somme Department, and the most northerly were off Dunkirk, more than 80 miles up the coast. The coastguard was also called to incidents in Wimereux and Grand-Fort-Philippe.
In other words, it is not just England that is being invaded. So is France, its rugged coastline saturated by thousands of predominantly young men all intent on crossing the Channel. I’ve written before of their violent desperation: the mob who last year attacked a group of hunters who had alerted the police to their presence in the dunes, and of others who assault police with cries of ‘Allahu akbar’.
The pro-migrant forces in Europe are far more powerful than a police force or border agency
The easy – and lazy – response is for British politicians and commentators to blame the migrant crisis on the inertia of the French police. A report in one British broadsheet on Sunday did just that, quoting Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary:
The French are completely failing to stop these illegal immigrants… also failing to intercept any boats at sea and return them as the Belgians do.
Some of the French police undoubtedly do stand idly by while the people smugglers load migrants into boats and push them off north. Others confront the smugglers and are met with a ferocious response from them and migrants. As one senior officer remarked earlier this year:
Coming from war-torn countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, some of them have military experience… we are faced with professionalised, structured networks which, since the end of 2023, have been encouraging migrants to engage in violence that we have never seen before.
The migrants also have a very powerful weapon on their side: the left. For many years, an alliance in France of politicians, journalists and NGOs have been working hard to undermine the police’s attempts to control the chaos on the Channel coast.
In 2017, the then interior minister, Gérard Collomb, launched an investigation after Human Rights Watch (HRW) claimed that police in Calais were using pepper spray on unruly migrants. In March last year, Le Monde published a lengthy report into what it called the ‘aggressive techniques’ of the French police to stop migrants crossing the Channel. It quoted a 16-year-old Somalian who complained to the left-wing newspaper that he had tried to reach England many times but to no avail because the ‘police systematically intervened to stop the boat on which he and others were hoping to cross’.
Le Monde’s report caught the attention of the Guardian, which expressed its outrage at the techniques of the French police. So, too, did members of the UK Border Force when they saw video footage, tut-tutting that ‘it could potentially lead to death. I can’t believe any mariner could condone that’.
One of the tactics of the French police was to puncture the inflatable boats as they left the coast – or ask the SNSM (France’s RNLI) to do it – but this led to a maritime union official filing a complaint with the Boulogne-sur-Mer public prosecutor. The law as it stands prevents the police from intercepting any boat once it’s in the water. In February this year, Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau expressed his wish to modify this law but this was criticised as ‘dangerous’ by some maritime organisations.
The police have the power to intercept the boats as they are carried across the sand to the water but it appears many have concluded, ‘why bother?’ If they do confront the migrants, they are likely to be attacked by them or accused by journalists and/or human rights groups of brutality.
In May last year, television journalists from the French equivalent of the BBC descended on Calais to record tales from migrants of police wickedness. They were helped in their work by a migrant NGO, Utopia 56. I’ve reported previously on the activities of the left-wing Utopia56 and in particular the philosophy of their founder, Yann Manzi.
He describes the chaos in the Channel as ‘a crisis of welcome, not a migratory crisis’. Manzi has requested that the authorities issue life jackets to all migrants and he also wants the governments of France and Britain ‘to open ferry routes and allow people who so wish to apply for asylum on English soil’.
The only real solution to cracking Britain’s – and Europe’s – migrant crisis was touched on by Nigel Farage on Saturday, a day on which 1,195 migrants landed in England. It is to push back the boats, said Reform’s leader, ‘to do what Tony Abbott did when he towed boats back to Indonesia’.
The strategy of the Australian prime minister a decade ago worked, and it would work in Europe if governments joined forces to push back boats as they tried to illegally cross the Mediterranean and the Channel. This was allegedly done a few years ago when Fabrice Leggeri was in charge of Frontex, Europe’s border agency. He resigned in 2022 after being accused of ‘complicity in illegal pushbacks’ – though the Frenchman denied he was involved in the practice.
According to a senior Frontex official, Leggeri was forced out because ‘the pressure from pro-migrant elected representatives and NGOs, who are leading the charge in Brussels against the Leggeri line, was too strong.’
These elected representatives and NGOs also have the support of much of the mainstream media and the judiciary. Yesterday, for example, a court in Berlin dealt a blow to Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s migration crackdown by ruling that the rejection of asylum seekers at German borders is unlawful.
In short, the pro-migrant forces in Europe are far more powerful than a police force or border agency. This is why – to quote John Healey, defence secretary – Britain has ‘lost control of its borders’. Because this is what Europe’s elite want: a continent without borders.
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