Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is seeking to distract from his own government’s “abject failure” to protect Britain’s borders by attempting to cast the blame for the English Channel migrant crisis on Nigel Farage and Brexit, a think tank told Breitbart London.
In his latest Orwellian turn, Prime Minister Starmer has embarked on an effort to rewrite history to blame the Channel migrant crisis on Brexit and Nigel Farage.
The floundering leftist PM, who has overseen a record number of illegal crossings since the start of the year, claimed Wednesday that the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union, which resulted in Britain leaving the Dublin returns agreement, was the principal factor in driving the migrant crisis.
“I would gently point out to Nigel Farage and others that before we left the EU, we had a returns agreement with every country in the EU, and he told the country it would make no difference if we left,” Starmer told GB News.
“He was wrong about that. These are ‘Farage boats’, in many senses, that are coming across the Channel.”
Contrary to Starmer’s claims, the Channel crisis began before Britain left the EU, with nearly 2,000 boat migrants landing on British shores in 2019. This replaced the previous smuggler routes, such as migrant stowaways in the backs of lorries or other vehicles, which were widely reported on by Breitbart London at the time and became increasingly difficult amid stepped-up security checks.
Even the BBC’s fact-checking Verify service noted that under the Dublin agreement, the return of migrants to the EU “was relatively small,” reporting that in the pre-Brexit year of 2015, just 510 migrants were sent back to the bloc under the agreement.
Starmer’s comments also ignored the fact that Mr Farage was one of the first national politicians to consistently raise the issue of illegal migration in the Channel, for which he even faced police warnings for filming the boats amid Britain’s covid lockdown regime.
Mr Farage has also been at the forefront of calling for the UK to use the British Royal Navy to push migrants back to France, ensure that welfare schemes only benefit British citizens, and leave the deportation blocking European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), all policies that Starmer and his government have shot down.
Starmer has instead focused on a “smash the gangs” strategy of targeting the people smuggling networks operating on both sides of the Channel. After over a year in office, this has had little impact on the crisis, with the number of crossings hitting historic highs under Starmer’s watch this year. Around 33,000 illegals have landed on British shores since January.
Rather than simply immediately returning illegals to the beaches of France, Starmer’s government negotiated a replacement deal for the Dublin agreement in July with Paris.
Dubbed the ‘one in, one out’ scheme, illegal boat migrants who cross the English Channel will be returned to France in exchange for migrants with alleged claims of asylum in the UK. So far, Starmer’s government has only managed to send back six migrants to France amid legal challenges, which often appeal to the ECHR.
Starmer’s latest attacks on Farage come in the wake of him branding the Reform boss a “racist” for proposing a policy to end the Indefinite Leave to Remain scheme, in a bid to remove hundreds of thousands of financially “burdensome” migrants who were brought in following Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit liberalisation of migration.
Responding to Starmer’s attempt to shift the blame onto Mr Farage, Chairman of the Migration Watch UK think tank, Alp Mehmet told Breitbart London: “The Prime Minister is clutching at another straw. Migrants are making their way here illegally in ever greater numbers because they know that once here there’s every chance they’ll get to stay for good.
“Before blaming others, the PM should consider his government’s abject failure to deal with the problem. What they’ve done and said since the election has heartened both migrants and smugglers. The latter are cashing in on it. At the current rate, we can expect another 200,000 small boat migrants to arrive illegally in the next four years. This will be entirely down to Sir Keir Starmer and his ministers.”
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