Healey slams ‘shocking' scenes of smugglers picking up migrants ‘like a taxi'
Hundreds of migrants are thought to have crossed the English Channel in small boats on Saturday, with at least six boats spotted leaving beaches in France.
French police officers were seen watching as migrants, including children, boarded at a beach in Gravelines, between Calais and Dunkirk, and authorities were then pictured escorting the boats.
French authorities said they rescued 184 people and that numerous boat departures were reported.
'Pretty shocking, those scenes yesterday,' John Healey told the Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips programme on Sky News.
'Truth is, Britain's lost control of its borders over the last five years, and the last government last year left an asylum system in chaos and record levels of immigration.'
The Defence Secretary said it is a 'really big problem' that French police are unable to intervene to intercept boats in shallow waters.
'We saw the smugglers launching elsewhere and coming around like a taxi to pick them up,' he added.
He said the UK is pressing for the French to put new rules into operation so they can intervene.
'They're not doing it, but, but for the first time for years, for the first time, we've got the level of co-operation needed.
'We've got the agreement that they will change the way they work, and our concentration now is to push them to get that into operation so they can intercept these smugglers and stop these people in the boats, not just on the shore.'
The highest number of arrivals recorded on a single day so far this year was 825 on May 21.
This year is on course to set a record for Channel crossings, with more than 13,000 people having arrived so far, up 30% on this point last year, according to analysis of the data by the PA news agency.
Sir Keir Starmer's Government has pledged to crack down on small boat crossings including with measures targeting smuggling gangs.
A Home Office source said: 'We have developed strong co-operation with the French and it is important that they have agreed to disrupt these boats once they're in the water – and not just on the shore.
'This vital step now needs to be operationalised to protect border security and save lives.'
A Home Office spokesperson pointed to measures to share intelligence internationally, enhance enforcement operations in northern France and introduce tougher rules in its immigration legislation.
'We all want to end dangerous small boat crossings, which threaten lives and undermine our border security.
'The people-smuggling gangs do not care if the vulnerable people they exploit live or die as long as they pay, and we will stop at nothing to dismantle their business models and bring them to justice.
'That is why this Government has put together a serious plan to take down these networks at every stage.'
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BBC News
3 hours ago
- BBC News
'Is my secret camera working?' - posing as a migrant to infiltrate a cross-Channel gang
The findings of a year-long undercover investigation into a violent migrant-smuggling gang were published by BBC News on 5 August - and, as a result, one person has now been arrested in Birmingham. Here, one of our reporters who assumed a false identity and posed as a migrant, describes how he met one of the gang's senior members in a secret forest hideout. I am walking towards the forest near Dunkirk, thinking about the battery in my pocket. I've hidden the wires under two T-shirts, but is anything still showing? Is my secret camera working? Is it pointing at the right angle? I have, at most, three hours of battery life left, and I need to get to the smuggler's secret camp, meet him, and get out is perhaps the most dangerous and most important moment for me, the culmination of many months working on this investigation with the is a small team of high-risk advisors watching my back. With gang members monitoring everyone who enters the forest, I worry my advisors may may end up exposing me rather than protecting me. But they play it perfectly and keep a low profile.I'm using a false name. My clothes are similar to those worn by other people trying to get a ride on a small boat to England. Scuffed, old shoes. A big, warm, dirty, jacket. A backpack that I've spent time trying to make look worn, as if I have travelled long, hard miles to get here.I keep going over my cover story in my head. The excuses I might need to get away quickly. The possible scenarios. We have planned and planned, but I know nothing ever goes exactly as expected in the field. Violent Channel smuggling gang's French and UK network exposed by BBCSuspected people smuggling arrest after BBC probe I am an Arabic-speaking man and have gone undercover before - but each time is different, and carries different the past couple of years, I've spent a long time in northern France, trying to understand and expose the people smugglers' complicated and shadowy operations. It was not an easy decision to infiltrate a violent criminal network.I'm entering a world ruled by money, power and silence. But I'm not just curious - I also believe the gangs are not as untouchable as they seem and that I can play a role in exposing them and perhaps helping to stop the forest, my nervousness fades. I am "Abu Ahmed" now - my false identity. I don't even feel like I'm acting a part.I'm new in town, a Syrian refugee whose asylum bid was rejected by Germany. I'm scared, desperate, a little lost and at the beginning of an uncertain journey.I walk down a path to the smugglers' camp trying to remember the way I came in. When the smuggler, Abdullah, meets me, he is friendly but he says he needs to leave immediately. I try to sound weary. I must persuade him to wait, to talk to me quickly, while my battery is still working. Then, I can get out of suspects nothing and seems entirely at ease. But I know the smugglers have guns and knives and there is only one path that leads in and out of the camp.A day later, away from the forest, I see online that there has been another fatal shooting of the most difficult things during my time undercover, in the weeks before I meet Abdullah, is keeping track of the phone numbers. Gang members change them often, and sometimes you can lose months of work in a second. At times I've lost hope, seeing everything fall apart. But I keep learning.I spend a lot of time meeting people waiting for small boats around Calais or Boulogne, asking them which gang they are using, which phone numbers they have. Early mornings are spent at train stations, food distribution centres, or on the edge of forests and beaches. Sometimes I just watch, trying to melt into a crowd, to overhear conversations, to spot glances and gestures and to see who leads and who follows.I must be careful. I move from place to place in different cars over the weeks, and generally try to disappear into the background. I don't want to do or say anything that could bring me to the attention of the smugglers. They have so many eyes and ears here, and if they become suspicious, it could be dangerous for me. Am I scared? Not too often. I have engaged with even more dangerous groups in the past. But I am worried I could make a mistake, forget a detail, and blow my cover. Or at least one of my covers.I switch phones too, contacting smugglers using different names and back stories to try to piece together who works where and what they do. I label each phone. I have French, German, Turkish and Syrian numbers. It is slow work. I'm careful to make sure I'm in the right place whenever I make a call, in case the smuggler asks me to turn on my video or send a pin showing my smugglers always ask me, "Where did you get the number?" And, "Who is with you? Where are you staying? How did you get to France?"Now Abdullah does the same, asking me to send photos showing my journey to the forest from a bus stop in he suspect me?In person in the forest, Abdullah appears friendlier than most of the smugglers I have encountered. I notice he seems keen to make all his passengers feel at ease, always responding to calls. He strikes me as ambitious. Over time, I learn some of the gang's vocabulary. Migrants are "nafar". The junior smugglers are "rebari". The forest is always "the jungle".And now it is time for me to leave the jungle and to head back towards my team who are waiting, anxiously, at a nearby I leave the forest and get to the road, I'm no longer "Abu Ahmed". I'm a journalist again, tortured by the camera work? Did I manage to film Abdullah confirming his role as a smuggler? Is anyone following me now?The walk back seems even longer.
Times
8 hours ago
- Times
Liberal Britain's had its fill of illegal immigration. Why now?
On Tuesday morning, Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, went on the BBC's Today programme to be interrogated about the government's new 'one in, one out' plan to deport illegal migrants back to France. It is the 'right principle', she said, that people who arrive on small boats should be returned. Amol Rajan, the host, pressed Cooper. 'The trouble is, a year on from being in power, the numbers are going up, not down,' he said. 'Don't you think, if you said … 'we hope to return 5,000 a year through this scheme' it would help win the public over?' You could hardly hope for a better encapsulation of just how far the liberal consensus on migration has shifted in this country. Neither the Labour home secretary nor the Today show host interrogated the assumption that illegal migrants should be deported; it was merely a question of how many and how fast. Ten years ago, at the peak of the Syrian refugee crisis, with some desperate migrants boarding boats to reach Britain, both took a very different tone. In September 2015, Cooper, as shadow home secretary, was granted an emergency debate in the House of Commons on the refugees. She made a firm appeal to the conscience of parliament, insisting that 'we have a moral duty to do more'. A few months earlier, Rajan wrote an opinion column in the Evening Standard lamenting the 'general public hysteria about foreigners invading our island nation' as he attacked our 'inhumane' asylum system. The point is not that the politician and the journalist were wrong then and right now — no doubt both stand by their 2015 positions — but rather that the terms of this discussion have shifted quite remarkably. We are now having the debate about migration, both legal and illegal, on ground once occupied by the likes of Nigel Farage and Migration Watch. The hard-right flank is no longer even embodied by Farage but the erstwhile Reformer Rupert Lowe, who is making arguments for mass deportations and 'remigration'. What political theorists call the Overton window, the parameters within which a public discussion is held, has moved firmly to the right. Even The Economist magazine, staunchly anti-Brexit and shaper of elite opinion, recently ran a leader calling for the United Nations refugee convention to be scrapped altogether and replaced with something new, freeing wealthy countries from their current obligations towards asylum seekers. Alexander Casella, who ran the UN's refugee programme in Asia until 1996, heartily agreed with The Economist's position. 'This is what many people in the migration policy world think,' he says. 'The conventions, their time has passed. This whole system of having people come, screening them, keeping the refugees and doing something else with the non-refugees, it just doesn't work any more. We need something new.' • Will UK-France treaty stop small boat crossings? The deal explained The same shift in tone has taken place across Europe, where the Schengen free movement zone is becoming increasingly constricted. Ten years ago this month, Angela Merkel famously told Germany 'Wir schaffen das' — we can manage this — as she opened her country's doors to a wave of Syrian migration. Today, Germany has introduced enhanced border checks, as have Austria, Poland and Sweden. We have clearly passed an inflection point in Britain, too. But why? What changed? Some of the answers are staring us directly in the face. As the home secretary pointed out on Tuesday, we are now 400 weeks into the small boats crisis and more than 25,000 people have come this year already, which is a record. America's re-election of Donald Trump, who has effectively shut down the asylum system on his own southern border, along with Reform's surge in domestic opinion polls, has also highlighted just how fed up many voters are with a system that has seemingly veered out of control. Polite opinion is belatedly responding to this shift. 'Attitudes have hardened around asylum because of the visible lack of control in the Channel and around asylum hotels,' says Sunder Katwala, director of the British Future think tank. 'It's the visibility of it.' The particular imagery of boats landing on beaches provokes an atavistic recoil from many in this country, which has always seen the Channel as its moat, protecting Britain from unwanted continental advances. 'Boats are more worrying than Eurostar trains and lorries,' says Katwala. The roots of our current predicament go back decades, though, well beyond Trump or Reform. There were, of course, rows and riots over Commonwealth migration in the 1950s and 60s, culminating in Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech in 1968. But our contemporary debate over immigration really began in 1997 with the election of Tony Blair. Net migration almost tripled in the first year of the Blair government, which relaxed rules around work and study visas. Blair was committed to his vision of a cosmopolitan, open-minded Britain, and keen for the economic benefits of immigration. And so, in 2004, as the European Union prepared for the accession of eight new eastern European countries, Blair made a fateful decision. Rather than adopt transitional controls of up to seven years on migrants from the new countries, Britain became the only major EU country not to apply temporary restrictions. At the time, government estimates put the maximum expected number of eastern European migrants at 13,000 a year. But almost half a million came in the four years that followed. Jack Straw, who was the foreign secretary at the time, later described the decision as a 'spectacular mistake'. 'It was obvious that their public assertion was untrue,' says Sir David Davis, the Conservative MP who was shadow home secretary in 2004. 'That's where it all started really. Frankly, until then, people weren't terribly bothered.' A month after the accession of the 'A8' countries, in June 2004 Britain held European parliament elections. The UK Independence Party (Ukip) won more than 16 per cent of the vote, doubling its share from 1999, and was rewarded with 12 seats. 'I think you can draw a straight line from there to Brexit,' says Davis. From 2004 onwards, net migration into this country was about 250,000 a year. So when David Cameron and the coalition government came into power in 2010, the new Tory prime minister made a speech promising to bring that figure down into the 'tens of thousands'. This provoked a huge row, with Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat business secretary, calling the speech 'very unwise' and saying it risked 'inflaming extremism'. Migration did drop briefly in the early years of the Cameron government, though nowhere close to the prime minister's stated target. But by now the world had entered the era of the smartphone, in which hyper-mobile migrants (and people-smuggling gangs) were able to communicate and move across continents with far greater ease. The internet meant Britain's pull factors — relative wealth, generous welfare provision, a large and poorly regulated grey economy, old imperial connections and use of the global lingua franca — became ever more apparent and appealing to far-flung populations. Combined with this were rising push factors, such as mounting war and instability. The number of people forcibly displaced by conflict doubled between 2015 and 2024, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The human exodus caused by the Syrian civil war was heartrending, but by 2015 the hardening response to it also highlighted the limits of public sympathy on migration across Europe. Between 2014 and 2016, John Dalhuisen was the director for Europe of Amnesty International Global, at the heart of its response to the crisis and a staunch critic of the 'one in, one out' deal between the EU and Turkey signed in March 2016. Then he had a change of heart. 'By 2017 I realised I was badly wrong,' he says. 'It was a volte-face.' He now runs the European Stability Initiative with Gerald Knaus, who helped broker the 2016 deal with Turkey that significantly reduced the flow of boat crossings. (Under the deal, a Syrian migrant arriving by boat in Greece was sent back to Turkey; in return a Syrian asylum seeker from Turkey was let in to the EU.) 'I never really abandoned the underlying principles, I just felt the [human] rights folk were miscalculating,' he says. 'There was a flat refusal to acknowledge an underlying political reality, which is that if societies are offered a choice between open borders or borders closed cruelly, they will choose the latter. We've seen that everywhere, again and again. The politicians have to offer control. Asylum for all is a beautiful moral intuition but it's not politically achievable.' Does the former Amnesty International man not worry about pandering to public sentiment that is arguably driven, at least in part, by xenophobia and racism? Isn't he letting the right set the terms of the debate? 'Is it pandering? Yes and no. The ultimate objective is to prevent really quite toxic political forces from coming into power. If you care about a rights framework, you need to keep these people out of power.' The small boats era began with a handful of Channel crossings in late 2018, as smugglers shifted from using lorries and ferries. Numbers peaked at more than 45,000 in 2022, although this year is on track to exceed that. In March 2020, under pandemic conditions, the government also began housing some asylum seekers in hotel accommodation as an emergency measure. By 2023, some 50,000 asylum seekers were living in hotels, costing the taxpayer millions of pounds a day. Alongside this, legal migration soared too. In 2021, Boris Johnson's government made a very Blair 2004 choice, taking the post-Brexit decision to liberalise visa applications from the rest of the world. The idea, as Priti Patel, the home secretary at the time, has put it, was to attract the 'brightest and best' to work in care homes, IT companies and at universities, hopefully boosting our flaccid economic growth. But again, the government drastically underestimated how many would come. In 2023, net migration reached a remarkable 906,000. 'People were understandably surprised by this,' says Davis. 'It was politically tone deaf. The Treasury as an entire department is like a drug addict, addicted to using the increase in the size of the workforce to grow the economy rather than improving productivity. They had allowed a whole load of industries to become dependent on it — hospitality, agriculture. They couldn't give up their supply.' Many of the Johnson-era visa rules were subsequently tweaked and immigration this year is expected to be less than half the 2023 number, at about 350,000. But with illegal migration still soaring, pictures of boats crossing the Channel daily still dominating the television news channels, and Sir Keir Starmer's promise to stop them proceeding slower than a Dieppe ferry, public anger remains high, which explains why that Overton window keeps moving. According to YouGov's opinion tracker, some 56 per cent of people think immigration and asylum is the most important issue facing this country, coming in first ahead of the economy on 46 per cent. The problem, Dalhuisen points out, is not just uncontrolled immigration itself but the perception of government impotence. 'People sense there's something wrong with the entire system,' he says. 'That's a dangerous and febrile position to be in.' Yet if (and it is a big if) something like the one in, one out scheme with France does actually work, and can be expanded across Europe, then Katwala believes the government has a chance of weathering this issue politically. 'If Starmer visibly has control, he would be in a more comfortable position,' he says. 'Net numbers are coming down and immigration's salience isn't as high for Labour voters. I think he's got a shot at this issue, if he can show that co-operation leads to some control.'
BBC News
9 hours ago
- BBC News
France's last newspaper hawker gets Order of Merit after 50 years
He is France's last newspaper hawker; maybe the last in Akbar has been pounding the pavement of Paris's Left Bank for more than 50 years, papers under the arm and on his lips the latest now he is to be officially recognised for his contribution to French culture. President Emmanuel Macron – who once as a student himself bought newspapers from Mr Akbar – is to decorate him next month with the Order of Merit, one of France's highest honours."When I began here in 1973 there were 35 or 40 of us hawkers in Paris," he says. "Now I am alone."It became too discouraging. Everything is digital now. People just want to consult their telephones."These days, on his rounds via the cafés of fashionable Saint-Germain, Mr Akbar can hope to sell around 30 copies of Le Monde. He keeps half the sale price, but gets no refund for before the Internet, he would sell 80 copies within the first hour of the newspaper's afternoon publication."In the old days people would crowd around me looking for the paper. Now I have to chase down clients to try to sell one," he says. Not that the decline in trade remotely bothers Mr Akbar, who says he keeps going for the sheer joy of the job."I am a joyous person. And I am free. With this job, I am completely independent. There is no-one giving me orders. That's why I do it."The sprightly 72-year-old is a familiar and much-loved figure in the neighbourhood. "I first came here in the 1960s and I've grown up with Ali. He is like a brother," says one woman."He knows everyone. And he is such fun," says Akbar was born in Rawalpindi and made his way to Europe in the late 1960s, arriving first at Amsterdam where he got work on board a cruise liner. In 1972 the ship docked in the French city of Rouen, and a year later he was in Paris. He got his residency papers in the 1980s. "Me, I wasn't a hippy back then, but I knew a lot of hippies," he says with his characteristic laugh."When I was in Afghanistan on my way to Europe I landed up with a group who tried to make me smoke hashish."I told them sorry, but I had a mission in life, and it wasn't to spend the next month sleeping in Kabul!"In the once intellectual hub of Saint-Germain he got to meet celebrities and writers. Elton John once bought him milky tea at Brasserie Lipp. And selling papers in front of the prestigious Sciences-Po university, he was acquainted with generations of future politicians – like President how has the legendary Left Bank neighbourhood changed since he first held aloft a copy of Le Monde and flogged it à la criée (with a shout)?"The atmosphere isn't the same," he laments. "Back then there were publishers and writers everywhere – and actors and musicians. The place had soul. But now it is just tourist-town."The soul has gone," he says – but he laughs as he does.
