I was a border force officer. Starmer’s ‘deal’ with Macron is worse than useless

There’s still no serious long-term plan for halting the increase in Channel crossings, let alone stopping them completely

TONY SMITH

I’d have loved to be in the room when the deal of the century was negotiated between Macron and Starmer. From one in, one out, to 17 in, one out – and that’s if you’re lucky. It’s a safe bet to assume that there will be no end to the small boat crossings anytime soon, then.

The Government will be keen to spin this as a win, given that we’ve never had a safe third country agreement with France. Starmer can say it’s the first substantive negotiation as a sovereign nation. It’s also a way for them to counteract complaints from Remainers that whinge that, if only we had stayed in the EU, we could remove the Channel migrants under the Dublin Convention.

This is the height of ignorance: even under that we hardly ever sent anybody back to France, as I know well from my time working on this in the Home Office, over many years. We had to prove that irregular arrivals had a family connection or had already claimed asylum there, and regularly sent over finger prints in order to see if there was a match. Funnily enough, we never seemed to get a positive result – unlike our more helpful allies in Holland and Germany. In fact we ended up taking more people in from the EU – mainly from Ireland – than we ever sent back under Dublin.

The devil, as always, is in the details. One statistic I saw bandied around about the actual likely rate of removals under the terms agreed with France would put attempted removals at just 6 per cent. Given that on our busiest crossing days we now can expect to get a thousand people arriving on our shores, that means only 60 people would be targeted for return to France. Hardly a deterrent to others.

It gets worse. How would these returns actually work in practice? The Border Force won’t be able to rescue them and take them straight back to Calais. Boat arrivals will still have to be taken to Western Jetfoil and Manston for triage. Will there be a limit on how quickly they can be returned? (Most migrants can only stay at Manston for 48 hours maximum, and the immigration detention estate is full). Many will go straight on to migrant hotels. The tiny figure we try to remove will be welcomed by a veritable army of immigration lawyers who helped wreck the Rwanda plan before a single flight could even get off the ground. So how many people will be on the plane to Paris? 20? 10? Less? Will this figure be under escort?

Even if that’s the case, it would be a waste of resources. We know well what the French will do as soon as they receive our detainees, as they’ve made their working operations clear through previous experience. Migrants will be dumped out, free to make the journey back to Northern France for another attempt at the border.

And who are the 60 we will take back in return? There are already legal routes for refugees in the UK to bring family to the UK. So presumably we are now opening up new routes for people who are currently inadmissible?

The Telegraph: continue reading

More than 1,200 small boat migrants have crossed Channel since Keir Starmer signed ‘one in, one out’ deal with France

MARK WHITE

More than 1,200 small boat migrants have crossed the Channel since the UK Prime Minister and French President signed a migrant returns deal on Thursday, GB News can reveal.

This morning, at least 300 migrants are attempting the illegal crossing.

Politics: the slope to perdition

RICHARD NORTH

I am at a total loss as to why Starmer is presenting an asylum deal with Macron – assuming it goes ahead – which will evoke nothing but groans of despair from the public at large, most of whom want to see a cessation of immigration and efforts made to return those already here.

Yet, even at its very best, the deal means that the number of migrants continues to increase. Illegal immigrants arriving by dinghy across the Channel will be detained and returned to France – up to a maximum of 50 a week for the time being. But, to cement this Faustian pact, the UK government will accept as many different individuals already in France, who will be brought here “via a safe route” and be treated as legal migrants.

Meanwhile, the flood of illegal immigrants goes on – close to 800 for the last week and over 20,000 on the year – third-world scum who have no right to be here yet are given red carpet treatment by the government at inordinate cost to the taxpayer.

By definition, these people are criminals, not only making an illegal entry into the UK but also paying gangs to transport them – technically a conspiracy offence to add to their original crime.

From the UK-France Leaders Declaration though, you wouldn’t get any inkling that we were having to cope with a surge of criminals invading these shores.

Rather, the focus is on the “the cruelty of organised gangs who smuggle individuals across the Channel at great risk to life”, which supposedly “blights both our societies”.

The phrasing here is utterly bizarre. These “organised gangs” can hardly be accused of “smuggling”. They transport their clients openly, usually in broad daylight, with the assistance of the authorities on both sides of the Channel, with the British government obligingly providing a taxi service for the second half of the crossing.

A better and more accurate way of putting it would be to state that these economic migrants – mostly with only the thinnest claims to a right to reside here – pay criminal enterprises to assist them in seeking illegal entry to the UK, heedless of the known risks in the expectation that they will be cared for by the maritime authorities.

What Starmer thinks he is doing is pioneering an innovative approach “to break the business model of organised gangs”, on the basis that the businesses will no longer be viable if the illegal immigrants are returned to from whence they came.

Yet an overall reduction of 50 a week, compared with 800 or so that might arrive, is hardly going to constitute any great deterrent to the gangs, especially if those returned to France are able to turn round and make another attempt.

Even then, there is no assurance that the figure of 50 will be reached or maintained in what is described as a pilot programme. The BBC helpfully tells us that the Home Office is refusing to speculate on how many illegals would actually be expelled weekly, noting that the number “may vary” during the pilot stage.

During yesterday joint news conference, neither Starmer nor Macron would be drawn on the details, asserting that an open discussion could undermine the operation of the scheme, when or if the scheme gets off the ground. We are told that the agreement is likely to encounter legal, political and practical obstacles, and the need to demonstrate “proof of concept” will not be straightforward.

In other words, this whole scheme is provisional, not least because it must be approved by the European Commission and member states, as the initiative is related to “an EU external border”. So much for Charlie-boy’s blathering about there being “no borders between Britain and France”.

Meanwhile, the burning of the Moygashel effigies (pictured) has gone ahead as scheduled, without police intervention, although gangs of teenagers have been guarding the site, just in case, and on the adjoining pavement, a freshly painted wooden sign was daubed with the words, “PSNI lift at own risk”.

The police, nevertheless, have intimated that they are investigating the bonfire as a “hate crime”, while Sinn Féin representatives have been complaining that the effigies represent “a clear incitement to hatred”, calling for them to be removed immediately.

This is not the only bonfire where there has been police involvement with a site in East Belfast coming to the attention of Belfast City Council, which was concerned about asbestos contamination and the risk to an electricity sub-station.

But, when the council instructed contractors to dismantle the bonfire, the PSNI issued a statement saying that they would not assist in its removal. It was felt, the police said, that “the risk of the bonfire proceeding as planned was lower and more manageable than the intervention of contractors and the proposed methodology of dismantling it”.

The weak police responses are unlikely to have gone unnoticed, especially in the light of a recent reportwarning that Irish nationalists campaigning on an anti-immigration ticket have been collaborating with Northern Irish loyalists and British nationalists. Historically, these groups have operated in opposition, with different objectives and narratives.

The report highlights how anti-immigration groups in 2025 have used “street protests, intimidation, targeted violence and coordinated amplification online” as part of their strategy. Recent protests in Coolock (Dublin), Ballymena (Northern Ireland), and Limerick have also shown evidence of the cross-border infrastructure of such mobilisation.

This is especially interesting as academic David Betzin his evaluation of the potential for a civil war suggests that cross-border “contagion” could play an important part in the emergence of a war. With coordinated disturbances breaking out simultaneously in different areas, this could stretch security forces beyond their ability to cope.

Betz, we have met before and his two-part paper hereand here makes a valuable contribution to the discussion. But in his latest broadcast he argues that we are past the tipping point, with no political solution available to prevent the onset of war.

Partly, this must be attributable to the egregious failure of Reform to provide a credible alternative to the “uniparty”, with established parties seemingly going out of their way to create the conditions for civil war. Moreover, videos of episodes such as the Manchester Airport incident, where a policewoman’s nose was broken by a Muslim thug, will help raise the temperature.

These bonfire episodes, therefore, are worth watching, especially as the perfectly reasonable response to the illegal immigration issue is being treated as a “hate crime”. This sort of cloth-eared response by the authorities is doing much to inflame tensions, and Starmer’s latest venture isn’t going to help any.

One wonders just how much our politicians are aware of how insulting and inflammatory their responses are to concerns about immigration – legal as well as illegal – and how their failures to act effectively are sending us hurtling down the slope to perdition.

Yesterday was one of those days when our descent accelerated, as Betz affirms that we are not taking “crazy pills”. The feeling we have had that something is going seriously wrong is right.

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This article (Politics: the slope to perdition) was created and published by Turbulent Times and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Richard North

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