FRENCH gendarmes looked on passively as another boatload of primarily young male migrants left for our shores at the weekend.
The number who have arrived here in small boats since January now stands at over 4,000.
And as the weather improves, it’s just going to get higher.
So, as our £475million deal with France to fund “beach patrols” runs out in a few days, the burning question is this: How will we notice the difference?
Sigh. Illegal immigration has been the nemesis of successive governments and, it seems that, despite Sir Keir Starmer’s electoral promises to “smash the gangs,” it will eventually be the nail in Labour’s coffin too.
Not least because, even as Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood tries to make it harder for migrants to settle here, she finds herself criticised from within her own party for being “un-British.” (copyright: Angela Rayner)
This is the soul-destroying doom loop we find ourselves in time after time.
Many British citizens/residents of all colours, cultures, and religions, who work hard and pay their taxes, have valid concerns that, when it comes to the governance of this country, they are bottom of the pile.
Just a lemon to be constantly squeezed.
So when a general election looms, they get rid of the party that didn’t fulfil its promises to tackle illegal migration and vote in the one that swears it will.
So when a general election looms, they get rid of the party that didn’t fulfill its promises to tackle illegal migration and vote in the one that swears it will.
And then, of course, it doesn’t.
Why? Well, resistance rooted in political game-playing rather than what is best for the future of this country is part of the problem.
So too is bureaucratic red tape, a legal industry that makes millions from enabling ludicrous claims, and the asylum system itself that needs a radical overhaul.
This week alone, we learned that one migrant who had been granted asylum here, after claiming he was gay, has a wife and child back in Cameroon.
While another — a paranoid schizophrenic from Nepal, who has committed multiple offences since arriving here in 2005 — has won the right to stay because he would be a “danger to society” if deported, because his parents, who live here too, wouldn’t be there to remind him to take his medication.
But if you think that Reform has the magic wand that will change all this overnight, think again.
Since Tony Blair’s New Labour policy of supposedly “managing migration for economic gain,” and the involvement of the coalition government under Tory David Cameron in removing dictator Muammar Gaddafi and his hold on Libyan borders, the floodgates have opened.
And closing them, or at the very least stemming the flow, is proving to be nigh on impossible whatever any political party tells you.
Since 2018, around 190,000 people have arrived here illegally on small boats.
So perhaps it’s just as well that Labour has announced a house-building bonanza and the creation of seven new towns.
But sadly, our country’s creaking infrastructure doesn’t appear to be expanding or improving accordingly and the looming energy and debt crisis suggests it likely never will.
It’s enough to make you board a small boat to Finland — just named the world’s “happiest” country for the third year in a row.
But as they have now tightened their immigration laws, they probably won’t have us.
