Kemi Badenoch says the Conservative party will take a look at withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), freeing us at a leap and a bound from the tyranny of human rights lawyers. The Tory leader would give Britain the power to deter the cross-Channel influx of asylum seekers, by withdrawing protections from those arriving in Britain without papers.
The government might as well install a gargantuan flashing neon sign on the White Cliffs of Dover: Refugees welcome here
As there is unlikely to be a Conservative government in the foreseeable future, this announcement is going to have no effect now, or any time soon, on the actual boats. And read the fine print: Badenoch hasn’t really even made up her mind; she is going to set up a committee to look into it.
In the real world, the boats aren’t being stopped, the gangs aren’t being smashed and the French judges and police are shrugging.
It was already a shambles. And now the Mail on Sunday reports that the courts in France have effectively started giving the actual people smugglers a free pass. An Afghan couple, resident in Germany, who were caught transporting a large inflatable, an outboard motor and 50 lifejackets, received a suspended sentence. Family members laughed in court.
The gangs have been given a green light. Anchors aweigh for the boats.
Photographs last week showed four Gendarmes standing on the beach, hard-looking men from the elite French paramilitary police. They have SIG-Sauer pistols slung low on their hips, jaunty calot field caps. But their hands are not on their guns but their phones.
Because before them in the shallow water is a massive inflatable boat – and scrambling to get in it, scores of fit men of African, Middle Eastern and indeterminate origin. Destination: England. And are the police stopping them? No, the police are taking pictures.
The police look like they don’t care about stopping the boat, and to be blunt, they don’t. Their presence is largely ceremonial on the lawless beaches of northern France.
I have a gendarme friend who was up near Calais on the comically-named Operation Poseidon, the ballyhooed £480 million Anglo-French deal signed two years ago, in which the French agreed to stop the boats, and the British to pay them them for doing it. For the French police, this mission really amounted to nothing more than hanging out on the beach, with binoculars.
Stop the boats? ‘Hein!’ she snorted. Officers have been pelted with stones and threatened with knives. Can’t she shoot them if they do? She rolled her eyes. The police know they will be betrayed by the politicians, if things get out of hand. So an ad hoc deal has been struck. The police are allowed to watch, but not stop the boats.
This capitulation of the French judiciary is the final stake through the heart of Operation Poseidon. Yet the French have just asked to extend the pact, and the British government has agreed.
Never have the politicians on both sides of the Channel been caught so blatantly skinny dipping, their phony announcements so nakedly exposed. The pretend policy of stopping the boats is just pish tosh. The Poseidon deal between Emmanuel Macron and Rishi Sunak is a farce, entirely useless, a dead fish, with the British taxpayer the patsy. The joke is on the rosbifs. My neighbours here in France are happy to see migrants leave France, I note in passing.
Daily X postings from the Prime Minister Keir Starmer boast of his great leaps forward on all fronts, including smashing at least one gang, supposedly, but not actually stopping the boats, because they keep coming. At Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s recent meeting with her French counterpart Bruno Retailleau, the ministers agreed to extend the useless Sandhurst Treaty underpinning the comedy Operation Poseidon.
The government might as well install a gargantuan flashing neon sign on the White Cliffs of Dover: Refugees welcome here.
There has never been any credibility in this ‘stop the boats/smash the gangs’ soap opera, which has so far seen Britain receive nothing other than tens of thousands more men (and a much smaller number of women and children) claiming asylum.
French interior minister Retailleau, an up-and-coming right-wing politician with presidential ambitions, last week promised to change the law to make it possible for the police to stop boats in the water. It is another meaningless announcement, like Badenoch’s. Never jam today, jam promised tomorrow.
Those wanting to stop the boats have been outsmarted, mostly by human rights lawyers. Even if by some extraordinary happenstance, Badenoch succeeded in withdrawing Britain from the ECHR, it wouldn’t cut any mustard in France.
The scandal on the Channel is a symptom of institutional collapse, on both sides of it. British and French ministers push buttons, post declarations on X, and nothing happens. In real life, hard-left NGOs deploy flotillas of lawyers. The police are neutered. Northern France has become a lawless world. And British taxpayers pick up the bill.
Moderate winds are likely to create favourable conditions for migrant crossings this week. So, as we say in France, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The uncomfortable truth is that the battle of the Channel has been fought, and lost.
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