The UK government has acknowledged that it has “lost control” of the nation’s borders as over a thousand more illegal migrants landed on British shores on Saturday.
According to figures from the Home Office, 1,194 boat migrants crossed the English Channel on Saturday in 18 vessels, marking a new high for the year.
Despite having forked over hundreds of millions to Paris to help pay for policing operations along the Calais coastline, French authorities only managed to prevent 184 illegals from crossing, or around 15 per cent of those who set sail.
Calculations from The Times of London found that the latest crossings have taken the total for the year to 14,811, a record high for this time of year and 42 per cent higher than at the same time last year.
Defence Secretary John Healey, while attempting to blame the previous Tory governments entirely for the situation, told Sky News: “Truth is, Britain’s lost control of its borders over the last five years, and the last government last year left an asylum system in chaos and record levels of immigration.”
Healey said that the British government is pressing Paris to fully implement new rules allowing police to intercept migrant boats in shallow waters off their coastline.
“They’re not doing it, but for the first time for years, for the first time, we’ve got the level of cooperation needed,” Mr Healey said.
“We’ve got the agreement that they will change the way they work, and our concentration now is to push them to get that into operation so they can intercept these smugglers and stop these people in the boats, not just on the shore.”
The Defence Secretary went on to call on the UK parliament to adopt new legislation to help “smash the gangs” which operate on both sides of the Channel to facilitate the people-smuggling trade.
However, the government has continued to refuse to leave the deportation-blocking European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and its associated court in Strasbourg, which critics claim incentivises illegal migration as foreigners have little fear of being removed from Britain if they enter illegally.
Earlier this week, Attorney General Richard Hermer claimed that doing so would be akin to moves made by the Nazi regime in the 1930s. He later apologised, claiming his comments were “clumsy”.
Meanwhile, the migrant crisis has ballooned to such an extent that the British coastguard was forced to ask fishing boats for help assisting emperilled kayaks and a yacht over the weekend as it was preoccupied with helping migrant boats cross the Channel.
The coastguard told The Times that it had been “responding to small boats activity in the Channel today”, but claimed “the coordination of multiple, simultaneous incidents is not unusual, and at no time was public safety compromised”.
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