I've been reluctant to write this but how are 200,000 small boat arrivals not an invasion?
OPINION - PAUL BALDWIN: Sorry but when boats containing 230 people are arriving on our shores how else should we describe it?
A little while back I appeared on The Moral Maze on Radio 4 as its kind of tabloid press bogeyman – and I must admit I thoroughly enjoyed it. Although I was hired as the whipping boy press oik, a foil to the usual lefty highbrows, I was happy for the opportunity to correct the many tired, lazy cliches about UK tabloid newspapers so often wheeled out by the BBC.
We’ll do the tired, lazy cliches if you don’t mind, Radio 4.
Although most hacks are clearly big enough and ugly enough to handle it, the ever-present, vociferous and more than occasionally violent attacks on the ‘Mainstream Media’ (or MSM) is one of the most ill-informed smear campaigns on the internet. And Lord, but that’s a high bar. The anti-MSM rhetoric is spread by two main groups:
Those people who have never read a newspaper in their life;
A bot-factory in St Petersburg where, let’s be honest, the vast majority of what passes for free speech and fair comment on the internet springs from.
Anyway, the Moral Maze conversation swung quickly to immigration (of course it did, they had a hideous tabloid hack to put on the rack) and I was accused of labelling the unchecked illegal immigration which has been troubling the Kent shores for decades, “an invasion”.
They were completely wrong, ill-informed and had not done their homework. Like most intelligent news editors I have always ordered my reporters to steer away from words like “invasion” – because frankly a handful of blokes hanging onto the underside of a lorry chassis for grim death was not an invasion.
Although I must confess my professional resolve and conviction this wasn’t “an invasion” was weakening with every boat landing. And then Monday happened. A massive boat carrying 230 illegal migrants was helped to British shores by our Border Force chaps so they could all claim asylum.
Clock that? 230 passengers. For scale, the hydrofoil which used to zip between Calais and Dover carried 50 passengers fully laden. We are assured numbers of illegals are down this year and so they are, to a mere 15,000 so far. But they aren’t down like Australia’s are down. Dramatically tough action Down Under has reduced illegal immigration to, er, zero.
No, over here since the authorities started tracking small boat crossings in 2018 more than 200,000 migrants have landed. For comparison, when the Great Heathen Army invaded from Scandinavia in 865AD, heralding Britain’s Viking age, it’s reckoned rather fewer that 5,000 Norsemen rocked up.
I’m a man of words and am supposed to use them in their correct context – but for the life of me I can’t see why 200,000 people who have no connection with Britain and no real business being here isn’t some sort of invasion? The plucky sailors arriving by small boat by the way hail mainly from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Eritrea, and Sudan – all nations famed for their liberal agendas and positive sexual politics, obviously.
Everything is wrong here isn’t it? The huge profits being made by firms housing bogus asylum seekers, the lawyers getting fat off our stupid, self-harming and endless, endless appeals system, the fact you cannot apply for asylum from where you live (only when you set foot on British soil – even if that is a Border Force vessel), the imbecilic championing of archaic human rights laws which no longer work either for the British people or true asylum seekers, and the constant, constant government lies.
Hands are being wrung, pearls are being clutched and nothing is being done. And this is because we no longer have the nerve to just go and do it. Politics is always painted as more complicated than it really is – largely to help stupid people look a bit cleverer. If we really want to stop the small boats then maybe the plan would be to, er, stop them. Turn them around and drop them back off at France. And worry about the very sketchy “international law” governing this practice later.
Because you know what the real world legal consequences of taking those practical steps would be? Nothing. And how do we know this? Because a few days ago socialist Spain was invaded by 79,000 would be migrants from Morocco, most of whom wished to seek asylum.
Within hours the Spanish and Moroccan militaries, using water cannons, baton rounds and rubber bullets, had sent almost all of them packing. No hand-wringing lawyers, no appeals system, just unequivocal direct action and goodbye illegals who had no business being there in the first place. Remainers (like Mr Burnham) are always enthusing that we should get more closely aligned with the EU. I think on this particular point they may be right.
