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Andy Burnham and Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood have been accused of losing control of Britain’s borders after 1,000 illegal migrants arrived in just three days. Home Office figures show 150 small boat migrants arrived on Monday 21 September; 154 arrived on Tuesday 22 September, and 781 on Wednesday 23 September. It means 1,085 came in a three-day period.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said: “It shows that Shabana Mahmood has no control over our borders, with these boats doing it all the way across undetected. There could be others, as you rightly say. Now, last week was a shocking week… coming into the country.”
Speaking to GB News, he claimed that France is doing nothing to stop small boats despite payments of £1 billion from the UK government.
“The French Minister of the Interior Monsieur Nuñez admitted a few days ago that the French gendarmes, for whom we pay, have orders not to do anything and not to intervene. I personally witnessed this a few weeks ago on the beaches. They do nothing to stop these boats.”
Mr Philp highlighted Conservative plans to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
“There is only one solution to this, which is to do what the Australians did about 13 years ago: leave the ECHR and deport all the illegal immigrants within a week of arrival, and then the crossings will stop pretty quickly.”
In an interview with Labour’s annual conference, which will take place in Liverpool this week, Prime Minister Andy Burnham said that Brexit would have made stopping small boats more difficult.
He told BBC South East that the UK and the European Union had “a more co-operative system, if you like, in the past” to prevent small vessels from crossing the sea between France and the UK.
“We’re not able to have the same cooperation that we used to have, but I don’t put that as a reason why we can’t continue to work until we get the intersections down right away,” he said.
The prime minister said he would not name a date until the government would stop all crossings.
“But what I can tell you is, I will not stop, and neither will the Home Secretary, until we remove every element of this criminal, illegal activity,” he added.
