Dover and Portsmouth: Protests

Chris Philp Excerpts

Monday 7th September 2026 Commons Chamber

[Chris Philp (Croydon South) (Con)]

I thank my constituency neighbour, the Minister for Policing and Crime, for advance sight of her statement.

I am sure that we all agree that the right to protest is a fundamental part of our democracy, but the right to protest should never be violently exercised or cause serious disruption to other people. I am sure all of us would equally condemn any form of protest where those guidelines are abused, and support the police in ensuring that protest, where it occurs, is lawful and peaceful. However, these events should be a wake-up call for the Government. It is not just the protesters in Dover and Portsmouth who feel so angry about large-scale illegal immigration. Millions and millions of people up and down this country feel angry as well.

Since the general election, over 80,000 illegal immigrants have crossed the channel, all illegally and all unnecessarily, because France is a safe country—nobody is fleeing persecution in France. Almost 20,000 have crossed this year alone, and 625 crossed yesterday, with more coming in the early hours. Every day when the sea is calm, hundreds of illegal immigrants cross the channel. The numbers this year would have been higher, were it not for rough seas in the past few months. The Government should not be complacent at all. This problem is not solved and I do not think the plan is working, if indeed there even is a plan.

I was on the beaches of northern France just a few weeks ago, waist deep in water as one such dinghy embarked with about 100 illegal immigrants on it, while 10 members of the French gendarmerie nationale, who we pay for—who the Home Secretary pays for—with £660 million of our money, almost all of it unconditional, stood by and did nothing. They could easily have stopped the boat embarking in knee-deep water. After that happened, I asked one of the gendarmes why they did nothing, and he said they were under orders not to intervene. Almost all the French officers are prohibited from preventing embarkations in the water and they do not prevent the migrants getting to the water’s edge either. As long as that continues, the crossings will continue as well.

The Minister mentioned return numbers, but what she did not mention is that the return of 6,000 small-boat migrants in the past two and a bit years amounts to only 8% of illegal immigrants crossing the channel. That is to say, 92% of illegal immigrants crossing get to stay. There is no deterrent whatsoever in that. The people who cross illegally are costing billions and billions of pounds to accommodate in hotels and apartments, and then costing even more once they get asylum and start claiming welfare.

The people are angry—not just because of the numbers and the expense, but because of the crime being committed. A few weeks ago, I met Siobhan Whyte, the mother of Rhiannon Whyte, who was brutally murdered by a Sudanese illegal small-boat migrant called Deng Majek. Rhiannon was stabbed 23 times, including in the neck. Numerous rapes have been committed by small-boat illegal immigrants, including the rape of a girl in Nuneaton aged just 12.

The Government are using sleight of hand. They are moving illegal immigrants from hotels into apartments, then granting them asylum on an industrial scale. Just this afternoon, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees—hardly a bastion of right-wing extremism, I am sure the Minister will agree—said that Home Office asylum decision making meets its own standards in only half of cases. The UNHCR, no less, said that many illegal immigrants being given asylum do not deserve to be granted that status under the Government’s own rules.

A whistleblower in The Times today said that only 1% of asylum claims are really genuine. I cannot give all the many examples, in the interests of time, but they cited one example in which apparently hundreds of Pakistani men claimed to be gay, based on a letter from an individual claiming to be the sexual partner of all of them. That is quite clearly fabricated with the assistance of immigration lawyers. When the system is being abused on that scale, it is no wonder that people get angry.

This Government repealed most of the Illegal Migration Act 2023, which prohibited illegal immigrants from ever getting citizenship. If the Minister wants to create a deterrent, I strongly suggest that she reinstitutes that measure. This Government cancelled the Rwanda scheme, which would have seen illegal immigrants getting deported, before it even started. If the Government are serious about fixing this issue and ending public anger, they need to get serious about the measures, leave the European convention on human rights and deport illegal immigrants as soon as they arrive—then people will not be so angry.

[Sarah Jones]

I thank the shadow Home Secretary for the start of his remarks; I think we would all agree that the right to protest should never be violently exercised. We all agree that it is not just protesters who feel angry about the current system, and we are doing all that we can to bear down on it and change what we inherited.

I know that the shadow Home Secretary was in France—we all saw and enjoyed the videos over the summer. He claims that the weather accounts for the improved situation we find ourselves in. The 43% cut in the number of people coming across on small boat crossings this year compared with last year cannot be accounted for by the weather; that is just a fact, and I hope he accepts that. I also know that he spoke to some land officers, who were not maritime officers—the officers who can enter the water. We have footage, which he has hopefully seen, of maritime officers going into the waters and doing exactly what he wants them to do. I hope he can learn a bit more about what our deal is and what responsibilities we are paying for.

The shadow Home Secretary said that we are just giving the French money without results. He knows that the new deal we have done with the French introduces payment by results for the first time. Under his Government, there was nothing; we were throwing money with no payment by results. Some £110 million of what we give to the French is dependent on their delivering results, which is why we are seeing an improvement. We are also funding more than 1,000 French police—a historic level of funding—and working in partnership with them to ensure that we are doing the things we need to do to stop the small boats from coming and to strip the criminal gangs of their armoury. Germany, for example, where a lot of the boats were being warehoused, has just passed a law to make it an offence to sell them for use in this kind of smuggling activity in another country. We are doing every single thing that we can and pulling every single lever, and the results speak for themselves.

Sadly, I think the shadow Home Secretary is the only person in this place who thinks that the Rwanda scheme would have worked. The rest of us—including, I suspect, people on his own Opposition Benches—have come to the conclusion that it was a gimmick and would never have worked. The numbers and the results we have seen over the last two years speak for themselves. In partnership with French law enforcement, we have prevented over 48,000 attempted crossings. That is substantial.

Of course, we have a lot further to go, and the shadow Home Secretary is right to have met the family of Rhiannon Whyte. What happened to her is horrific—nobody would claim anything else—and it is in her memory, and the right thing to do for every single one of our constituents across our country, that we take control of our borders and make sure we have a fair migration system. The Government are doing the hard work of restoring control at our borders. We are seeing progress. We are not complacent—we will continue to work—but I will end where I began, which is by agreeing with the shadow Home Secretary that we must allow the police to exercise the powers they need to exercise to stop thuggish and violent protest behaviour. That is what we are looking at, and if we need to learn lessons from what happened over the weekend, we will learn them. I am working closely with the police, as the shadow Home Secretary would expect, and we will make sure they have the resources they need to do their job.