“The fact is that we cannot stop everyone from crossing because there are just too many people and the coastline is too big. So [the British people] are giving more money from their own taxes that’s going to waste,” Dumont said, with remarkable candour — although whether it is really impossible to expect that 21st-century France should be capable stopping thousands of illegal migrants from roaming its coastline and launching boats to Britain is an open question,
“It’s going to harm the relationship between the two countries,” the Calais MP continued, speaking to The Telegraph.
“The British Government is just giving more and more money to the French authorities to reinforce security on the French shores and basically that’s something that doesn’t work. We’ve seen that,” he said — accurately, given the number of illegal migrants reaching Britain by boat has continued to rise despite every new press release from the Johnson administration about money to France or new patrols, drones, and so on, with the French actually escorting migrant boats into British waters rather intercepting them in some cases.
“We’ve seen that more money doesn’t mean the crossings will stop because we cannot monitor 400km, 500km, 600km of shorelines,” Dumont claimed.
While the Frenchman stressed the alleged impossibility of stopping the boat migrant wave in much of his interview with The Telegraph, he may have betrayed what some see as the reality of the situation in his closing remarks, saying: “We registered four times more asylum applications than the UK, so we are playing our part. The fact is the UK right now is not taking its part of the burden of asylum seekers.”
Leaving aside the question of why a French politician should feel entitled to allocate a share of migrants to Britain, Dumont’s attitude here may hint at what some believe to be the real reason British money is not helping the French to put an end to the crisis: they do not wish to end it, and are relaxed about watching illegal migrants depart their territory for some else’s.
Being steadfastly determined not to turn back migrant boats at sea unilaterally like the Australians, however, the Johnson administration’s latest attempt to appear to be at least trying to end the crisis has been to propose new laws that would make it harder to claim asylum after arriving by sea and increase prison terms for illegal entry.
This has already been undercut by the government’s woeful record on deportations regardless of whether an asylum claim is accepted and the fact that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) have recently announced that they will in most cases stop bothering to charge the great majority of illegal migrants even under existing laws.
Follow Jack Montgomery on Twitter: @JackBMontgomery
Follow Breitbart London on Facebook: Breitbart London
Originally found on Breitbart Read More
