Opinion: Channel migrants are troops recruited by Macron

Daily Mail​

2 days ago

Look at those people bobbing in the Channel, crossing the sea every day in an irresistible tide. See their pitiful burstable coracles, so rammed with humanity that their limbs are left trailing in the water.
Count the numbers that have been coming in, more than 40 per cent up on last year – tens of thousands of illegal aliens scrambling ashore and burying themselves in the crevices of our society. Then ask yourself the key question. Who benefits? Who is really behind this moral, political and economic disaster? Which is the evil genius orchestrating this daily humiliation of the British state? It is time to unmask the Mr Big – or Monsieur Petit – behind the whole thing, and I will give you a clue.
He has Cuban heels, a boyish charm, a lisping voice, and a wife who smacks him around in public. Yes, folks, there is one ultimate beneficiary of this whole nightmare, and that is Emmanuel Macron of France. As he made clear during his press conference with Keir Starmer, the French president is blatantly using this crisis to make a political point – namely that Brexit Britain has been unable to control its borders . It follows that every single one of those young men – and they are almost all young men – has effectively been recruited by Macron to embarrass the UK. These are his shock troops in his continuing jihad against Brexit.
He will keep sending them over the Channel in boat after boat until we accept his ridiculous and insulting assertion: that the British people are fools, that they swallowed a lie, and the whole problem of illegal migration is now so bad that we might as well concede that Brexit was a mistake and a delusion, and get back into the EU. That is Macron's game; that is his strategy. And that is why he will never do enough to stop the boats. No one was fooled by the 'returns agreement' this week between the UK and France, the so-called 'one in one out' deal by which illegal arrivals could be swapped for those with a legal claim to come to Britain.
By definition, this would do nothing to reduce the overall immigration total, since we would be taking one more person for every illegal arrival notionally sent back to France. More seriously, the proposal will do nothing to deter the gangs. Even if Macron can get the EU commission to approve the scheme, the French say that they expect to take about 50 people per week.
That is pathetic. As Chris Philp, the Tory Shadow Home Secretary points out – that would be only 6 per cent of the weekly arrivals. Even if this agreement were to get going, that means your average cross-Channel migrant would have a 94 per cent chance of staying in the UK; and everyone knows that, once you have your jaws clamped around the teat of the UK system, it is almost impossible to prise you away. This scheme is not serious. Macron agreed to do it as a sop to Starmer, and in exchange for the kudos of a state visit, and the chance for him and Brigitte to hobnob with the King and Queen.
He doesn't want to make it work – because he has had plenty of opportunity to do so before, and the French efforts have been lackadaisical in the extreme. The gendarmes have been given almost £800m of our money to patrol the beaches of Calais, and yet the problem is getting worse. They haven't fixed it because, fundamentally, Macron wants to convince the British public of a blatant lie – the one he told at the press conference – that this problem has been somehow caused by Brexit. What rubbish. Quelle poubelle! Remember that before Brexit we were obliged by basic EU law to treat every one of the 520 million EU nationals as if they were British citizens, for the purposes of migration to this country . It was insane. Brexit took back full legal control.
We can, if we choose, have absolutely zero legal migration to this country – zero. As for tackling illegal migration, EU membership was worse than useless. It is true that there was the 'Dublin convention' by which EU countries could in theory send illegal arrivals back to their country of origin within the EU. In practice, Dublin was a dud. It had broken down long before Brexit; the lawyers were making mincemeat of it, and hardly any illegal arrivals were being returned anywhere.
The whole thing was a farce, and we were prevented by EU rules from passing tougher laws ourselves. So, in blaming Brexit for the migrant crossings, Macron is uttering a great, stinking, festering falsehood, and if he had said such a thing in Brigitte Macron's classroom, I hope that she would have given him one of her trademark smacks around his smirking chops. The reality is that Brexit actually gives us the power to control not just legal migration – but to fix illegal migration as well ; and the tragedy of this government is that Starmer refuses to use those powers.
The Labour government is being sucked back into the orbit of the EU at the very moment when we need to be doing things our own way . Ask yourself: why does Macron hate Brexit so? Why does he see fit to come to this country, wag his finger, and tell the British public that they have been stupid and wrong? The answer is that he fears Brexit, and he fears the massive potential of an independent Britain. He saw what happened, for instance, when we diverged from the EU regulatory framework and achieved the fastest Covid vaccine roll-out in Europe, followed by the fastest exit from lockdown. He didn't like it at all.
He doesn't want Brexit Britain to succeed; he wants it to fail, to be brought to heel, and Labour is all too eager to oblige. Starmer is accepting EU law for the UK – with no say in making it, turning this country into a colony of Brussels . Worse, he seems on the point of adopting the French wealth tax, which has driven tens of thousands of entrepreneurs from France. They are taking this country back into a morass of unnecessary employment law, and suggesting such bizarre Soviet anachronisms as state-owned restaurants. All the while the Reeves-Starmer high-tax economic doom loop continues to stifle activity, so that, as reported yesterday, the economy shrunk for the second quarter.
When Starmer and Macron agreed their feeble returns deal, the French apparently set one condition. The UK would have to abandon the Rwanda plan. On the face of things, this was bizarre. Why should the French care? But on reflection the reason is obvious. Rwanda is made possible by Brexit, since we can ignore EU law on asylum and other matters to make it happen; and, unlike any other plan, Rwanda would actually work.
It doesn't mean sending back six per cent of illegals; it means sending 100 per cent of them from Kent to Kigali. The idiotic Starmer has axed this country's only practical plan to deal with the boats – at French behest! – while the French cynically refuse to do enough to help. Like the old Danish king of England, Starmer sits and watches as the waves of people wash irresistibly to our shores, and in his self-imposed impotence he is making himself look like a complete and utter Canute.