10-07-2025
I was a border force officer. Starmer's 'deal' with Macron is worse than useless
I'd have loved to be in the room when the deal of the century was negotiated between Macron and Starmer. From one in, one out, to 17 in, one out – and that's if you're lucky. It's a safe bet to assume that there will be no end to the small boat crossings anytime soon, then.
The Government will be keen to spin this as a win, given that we've never had a safe third country agreement with France. Starmer can say it's the first substantive negotiation as a sovereign nation. It's also a way for them to counteract complaints from Remainers that whinge that, if only we had stayed in the EU, we could remove the Channel migrants under the Dublin Convention.
This is the height of ignorance: even under that we hardly ever sent anybody back to France, as I know well from my time working on this in the Home Office, over many years. We had to prove that irregular arrivals had a family connection or had already claimed asylum there, and regularly sent over finger prints in order to see if there was a match. Funnily enough, we never seemed to get a positive result – unlike our more helpful allies in Holland and Germany. In fact we ended up taking more people in from the EU – mainly from Ireland – than we ever sent back under Dublin.
The devil, as always, is in the details. One statistic I saw bandied around about the actual likely rate of removals under the terms agreed with France would put attempted removals at just 6 per cent. Given that on our busiest crossing days we now can expect to get a thousand people arriving on our shores, that means only 60 people would be targeted for return to France. Hardly a deterrent to others.
It gets worse. How would these returns actually work in practice? The Border Force won't be able to rescue them and take them straight back to Calais. Boat arrivals will still have to be taken to Western Jetfoil and Manston for triage. Will there be a limit on how quickly they can be returned? (Most migrants can only stay at Manston for 48 hours maximum, and the immigration detention estate is full). Many will go straight on to migrant hotels. The tiny figure we try to remove will be welcomed by a veritable army of immigration lawyers who help wreck the Rwanda plan before a single flight could even get off the ground. So how many people will be on the plane to Paris? 20? 10? Less? Will this figure be under escort?
Even if that's the case, it would be a waste of resources. We know well what the French will do as soon as they receive our detainees, as they've made their working operations clear through previous experience. Migrants will be dumped out, free to make the journey back to Northern France for another attempt at the border.
And who are the 60 we will take back in return? There are already legal routes for refugees in the UK to bring family to the UK. So presumably we are now opening up new routes for people who are currently inadmissible?
While these migrants wait in Calais for another opportunity to cross, we can rest assured that the French police's involvement will be minimal. Unlike in the UK, where we actively arrest and challenge people we suspect to be here without permission, the French just leave migrants in limbo with little attempt to arrest and deport them. Occasional raids on French encampments have little impact, with migrants simply moving elsewhere in the area and surviving on handouts from local refugee groups pending their turn to cross the channel. Factors like this have helped to turn parts of northern France into lawless zones, with gang shootings and stabbings becoming an increasingly frequent occurrence, much to the upset of local residents.
It is therefore in Macron's interest to move forward on a genuinely effective mutual agreement between our two countries. But he is also correct to childe us for failing to remove the pull factors that make Britain an even more attractive destination nation than France. If you can get within a 12 mile zone, you'll get fresh clothing, food, somewhere to live and a nice off-the-books job that can provide a decent income - and, best yet, you'll never have to repay the costs incurred to the British taxpayer.
The inconvenient truth is that this scheme is in no way the deterrent the Government is attempting to suggest it is. The message going out to people smugglers this week is that the crossings can carry on. For the sake of the country, I hope I'm wrong. But I know all too well how easily even the extremely modest ambitions of this agreement can be frustrated.
