In today’s Telegraph, the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, channelling her inner King Canute, boldly declared “Britain can’t stop small boats by shouting at the sea”.
And she’s absolutely right, but that is exactly what Labour is doing, shouting into the sea.
Labour today announced plans to double funding for its Border Security Command unit taking the total budget to £150 million.
Positioned as an innovative approach to the migrant crisis, it is a continuation of what the Conservatives were doing prior to the election, except of course, Labour’s plan misses the key ingredient of all – deterrence.
Jacob Rees-Mogg hit out at Labour
GB NEWS
One of the first things Labour did upon entering government was to scrap the Rwanda plan as well as abandoning the criminalisation of illegal migration.
The Conservatives recognised that crossing the Channel was not a legitimate means of coming to this country hence the Illegal Migration Act’s designation of Channel crossings as criminal. The people who did so beyond a certain date were never going to be given British passports.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper PA
The Conservatives also recognised that the Rwanda plan was necessary to deter people from making the journey in the first place.
But now Labour will process each and every migrant in the backlog, the majority of whom will be accepted, and this will only get worse with the lack of deterrence.
The only way to solve the migrant crisis is to stop giving criminal entrants more rights than British citizens and so to leave the ECHR, withdraw from the Refugee Convention and to revive the Rwanda plan.
The ECHR is not what we agreed to as the judges have adopted the living document doctrine to make it up as they go along. Our rights are defended by the King in Parliament, a democratic and accountable body. The ECHR puts the rights of illegal migrants ahead of British taxpayers.
The Refugee Convention was written in the aftermath of the Second World War and did not foresee the globalised nature of asylum. As it is currently written, up to three quarters of a billion people could be refugees hence entitled to asylum in the UK.
And the Rwanda plan is what will ultimately deter people from crossing to the UK, in its absence there is no serious deterrent.
Now we are left with a Labour government which is busy shouting into the sea, recycling small parts of old Tory plans whilst effectively opening our borders to anyone who is willing to cross the Channel. Labour’s plan is a non-plan quite simply because it doesn’t want to solve the problem.