Of course France won't stop the small boats

Spectator

5 hours ago

The BBC have visited the French coast to see for themselves that Nigel Farage (and Coffee House) aren't making it up: there is indeed a migrant crisis on the beaches close to Calais and has been for years.
Britain certainly won't receive much in the way of help from the pro-migrant Emmanuel Macron, despite what Keir Starmer may claim
The Beeb paid their call last Friday and encountered around 80 people waist deep in water. These weren't locals having a dip to escape the June heatwave but migrants from Eritrea, Afghanistan and elsewhere. They were waiting for what the BBC described as a 'taxi-boat', one of the myriad vessels that cruise the coastline picking up passengers and transporting them across the Channel to England. 'The taxi boat system appears to give the smugglers a little more control over what has often been a chaotic and dangerous process,' explained the BBC.
More control means more efficiency which results in larger numbers of 'passengers' being taxied to England. So far this year over 16,000 have made the voyage north (an increase of 42 per cent on the same period in 2024). Given that the weather is set to be fair for the foreseeable future, the numbers will only increase in the coming months. Even Downing Street admitted on Tuesday that the situation is 'deteriorating'.
There is another certainty to the Channel migrant crisis and that is that the French will do little to stem the human tide. Why should they? It's in the interest of the government to offload migrants onto Britain.
At the start of the year Bruno Retailleau, the Interior Minister, bullishly declared that he wanted to change the rules of engagement so that the French police could intercept migrant boats in shallow water; that has yet to happen.
Retailleau gave a lengthy radio interview on Wednesday morning, talking for 25 minutes and immigration and insecurity. Not once did he mention small boats on the Channel. What he did talk about was tightening France's borders within the Schengen area: in other words reducing the number of illegal immigrants crossing into France from Italy, Spain, Germany and elsewhere. But not a word about Britain.
Retailleau doesn't care about Britain, and why should he? Like all French conservatives he believes Britain's migrant crisis is to large extent a mess of their own making. In 2015 one of Retailleau's centre-right colleagues, Xavier Bertrand, said migrants regarded Britain as a utopia 'because there's work there, and above all, you can work there without identity papers.' England, declared Bertrand, 'needs to change its rules on working with illegals'.
Retailleau is expected to run as the centre-right candidate in the 2027 presidential election and a recent opinion poll indicated he is likely to be a serious contender. He's in favour of a referendum on immigration and he's also a fierce critic of what he regards as the left-leaning judiciary. For the moment, however, there is little he can do to tackle the small boat crisis so why get involved? It could undermine his tough-talking image. Better to turn a blind eye and let the British suffer.
Britain certainly won't receive much in the way of help from the pro-migrant Emmanuel Macron, despite what Keir Starmer may claim. The PM and the French president apparently discussed the migrant crisis at this week's G7 Summit in Canada and agreed to 'work closely' together to stem the small boats.
As closely as Macron promised Rishi Sunak in 2023? On that occasion the PM wrote the president a cheque for £500 million in return for a promise to clamp down on small boat crossings. It was, proclaimed Macron a 'moment of reconnection' between the two countries.
As Donald Trump remarked earlier this week, 'whether purposely or not, Emmanuel always gets it wrong.' The same goes for all the British PMs who have boasted they were going to crack the migrant crisis.