So, 514 people across the English Channel yesterday, don't know the numbers yet today, guessing it'll be 250 to 300, something like that. You know, the Prime Minister keeps telling you that since he became PM, the numbers are down. But I'll tell you what. So far this year, they're 10% up on last year, all of which proves the reason numbers were down last year was frankly, because the weather was so awful.
Now, all the debate about the Rwanda bill and in the end, it will go through the House of Commons. Oh though not with any sense of urgency, but it still won't make any difference because, of course, the judges will use the European Convention on Human Rights to scupper the whole thing. But today, would you Adam & Eve it, the government have declared a migrant emergency in the English Channel.
Well, yours truly. When he was doing his best back in 2020 to wake everybody up as to what was going on, when I realised the implications would mean huge numbers coming. August 2020. I wrote this in the Daily Telegraph. I tweeted about it. I said, then, we should be declaring an emergency. And nearly four years later, the government is now using that language.
Why? Because they're embarrassed. Why? Because there is an election coming up. But the whole point of Rwanda, it's supposed to be deterrence. You know, we send 300 people to Rwanda and then people will say, woah, hang on a second, is it worth paying the traffickers? Worth thinking in the context of 300. That might just be one day's crossing, maybe only half a day's crossing unless Rwanda was prepared to take thousands.
I'm not sure., even as it looks, it would stand to be any deterrent at all. But the Nationality and Borders Bill, you remember Priti Patel saying, we're going to crack down on the criminal gangs. We're going to make sure that those that actually take the boats, hold the tiller, get the engine, take them across the English Channel. These people will be defined as smugglers and they could face up to life imprisonment.
Another strong deterrent. Well, think this through.
This FOI request and you can see the numbers on the screen in front of you. This shows 2750 boats have crossed the English Channel since this crisis began. And yet only 150 people, only 150 have been prosecuted and nearly all of them are Africans.
The prosecution today is a man from Sudan.
Why is it always Africans? Well, they haven't got the money in most cases to pay the traffickers the €5,000. So their way out of it is to take the tiller and effectively become one of the smugglers. That's why in nearly every case, it's Africans. But the conviction that we've seen today of a Sudanese man who took a boat across the English Channel is just 20 months.
It's hardly life imprisonment or anything approaching life imprisonment and other sentences vary from that to two years, maybe to three years at the absolute maximum. So every promise the Conservatives have made, every time they stand up and talk tough, we're sending the Navy into the English Channel. You will get life imprisonment. Every single time any of this gets to our courts, we find the whole thing is watered down beyond belief.
And the net effect is we just put another hundred and 50 young African men into an already overcrowded British prison system, rather, in the case of this man, where he should be sent straight back to Sudan. Don't believe a single word you hear from the Sunak government, the same as the Johnson government that preceded it. They haven't got the guts.
They won't deal with the essence of the problem, which, of course, is very simply that the judges can stop anything that goes through parliament. Longer term, we need reform of all of that. Blair's reforms have left our parliament, frankly, pretty impotent. But I promise you, many tens of thousands will cross the English Channel this year, and with it, the Conservative Party's prospects are going down the plughole.
And it's only happening because of cowardice. It’s only happening because they won't face up to the fact, we have a series of international agreements that are now 70 years out of date. Think of those numbers. Only 150 were convicted of taking those boats across the channel out of 2750 boats.
1 окт 2024
