A Conservative Peer has asked why migrants picked up in the Channel were not taken back to Calais after a boat which rescued migrants from a capsized boat took those on board back to France.
Jacqueline Foster also said she thought the ECHR was ‘out of date’ and claimed Labour had ‘thrown the baby out with the bathwater’ by scrapping the Rwanda plan with no third country alternative.
Speaking on GB News, Jacqueline Foster said: “With the European Union there’s always a quid pro quo, and whatever they agree, would we then end up having to take in illegal immigrants from the rest of the European Union?
“From my point of view, that’s a non-starter. I think in addition, Keir Starmer also said he was going to give them another £84 million. Well, we’ve already given France about half a billion of taxpayers money, and they’ve done absolutely nothing, frankly, over the last couple of years.
“You raised the point about the boat that turned around today and took these illegal immigrants back to Calais. My question then would be, well, why haven’t they been taking them back to Calais for the last two or three years? So I’d like an answer to that.
“I think the ECHR is out of date, and in terms of the legislation that we did pass, and we really tried to get good legislation through over the last two and a half years, and we were thwarted at every at every quarter, whether it was the Rwanda bill or whether it was the illegal immigration bill, by the opposition parties, frankly, to put safeguards in to try and get to the bottom of this, they’ve apparently now been pretty well ripped up.
“So I wish the Labour Party well. But there’s no quick fix in all of this, and obviously what we have in all of this is this great tragedy of people who are trafficked and those that lose their lives.
“We shouldn’t be having people losing their lives. There are legal ways to get into the United Kingdom, and many people come into the United Kingdom legally, and they don’t need to have their lives threatened.
“We know this is all about gangs. We are part of Interpol. We’re part of all of these bodies that are trying to stop this. Where are the Labour Party going to deport their illegal immigrants to? Because they’ve thrown Rwanda out, the baby out with the bathwater. Yet, there’s other countries in the European Union looking for countries to send them to.
“There was always this push [in the European Parliament] to common foreign and security policy and defence and we’ve got two nuclear powers with France and the United Kingdom.
“NATO is the Kingpin and what’s important is actually [The USA] and who’s going to be the next President of the United States in my view.
“We we do have a very good relationship with the European Union. It’s not just the EU, it’s the whole of the 44 European countries. But what I want to see now is strong leadership in Europe and I hope Donald Trump is successful in the election later this year because we need a really strong voice and a strong leader in North America and in the USA.”
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