Illegal Immigration

Debate between Mike Tapp and Nigel Farage

Tuesday 10th September 2024 Westminster Hall

[Nigel Farage (Clacton) (Reform)]

I thank the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien) for calling this debate. He must find it excruciatingly embarrassing how badly the previous Government dealt with this issue.

With my strong connection in Kent and Sussex with the commercial fishing industry, the angling trade and indeed the lifeboats, I started to feel in early 2020 that —after the odd boat had crossed in 2018 and 2019, as the hon. Member for Dover and Deal (Mike Tapp) mentioned—something big was about to happen. The gangs had realised that the chances of deportation from this country were very low. So I went out repeatedly from Dover into the English channel, filming boats and meeting face to face with boatfuls of the young men who have been described—in many cases, very aggressive young males.

I also got to the bottom of the use of the word “escorts”. I kept being told that escorts were crossing the channel. I was not quite sure what that meant, to begin with, but then I understood that it was the French navy—that the French navy literally escorted boats across the English channel and handed them over to Border Force or the Royal National Lifeboat Institution —so I made a bit of a fuss about the whole thing. I said that unless something was done, huge numbers would come. I said that there might even be an “invasion”, a word that got me in very big trouble. Given that we are pushing up towards 140,000 who have come, I do not think I misused the word.

The efforts of the last Government to deal with this were frankly pretty pitiful. Rwanda might have worked in theory, but of course in practice it was not going to work. All the while, we are subject to that Court in Strasbourg, as we saw that evening. More interestingly, the incorporation of the convention into British law means that actually British judges will always rule in favour of the ECHR, so we have to face up to that reality.

I also believe that what we are facing is a national security emergency. When ISIS boasted in 2015 that it would use the Mediterranean to get its operatives into Europe, perhaps the European Union should have taken it more at its word. It was interesting to note that Sir Keir Starmer himself used the phrase “national security emergency” during the general election, so he is going to have to act accordingly.

Appointing a new border chief commander? Yes, we may get some better intelligence—fine, but the French, whom we have given hundreds of millions of pounds, already stop a lot of dinghies from crossing. They put knives in the dinghies, but the problem is that the prospective illegal immigrants just hide in the dunes and come back the next day. So that is not going to work.

Smashing the gangs? Well, I don’t know. What I have been hearing for the past 30 years is that we are going to smash the drugs gangs in this country, and yet there are more class A drugs being taken today than there ever were before. A good operative gang, working out of those sand dunes in northern France in a reasonable week of weather, can expect to make at least €2 million. The financial rewards are very, very high.

Really, what this comes down to is two things. No. 1 is political will. Successive Australian Prime Ministers attempted to deal with the problem; they all failed. They tried offshore processing and so on, until in the end Tony Abbott just towed the boats back to Indonesia. There was international outrage from the UN, the EU and indeed the Foreign Office.

[Mike Tapp]

Are you aware of the fact that they were steel-hulled vessels—

[Mike Tapp]

If we attempt to do the same, we are likely to kill people in our waters. Is that what you want to see?

[Nigel Farage]

Just a few weeks ago, for the first time, Border Force did an emergency pick-up on the other side of the line. Rather than bringing the people back to this country, as previously Dover lifeboat and Dungeness lifeboat had done, it actually took them into Calais. That is the way we do it. Yes, these are far flimsier vessels, but the principle of taking people back whence they came is the point that I am trying to make.

We can do this. We can do it under the international law of the sea. I ask the Minister to say that, given the money that we have given to the French, we will no longer accept escorts from the French navy. The day after 12 people died in the channel, a French naval vessel escorted a dinghy from a couple of hundred yards off Wissant all the way to our 12-mile line. No more French naval escorts—I think that is vital.

We need political will. The Germans, of course, are now showing it. The Germans will ignore the ECHR; the Germans, by the way, sent a plane full of young men back to Afghanistan the other week. With political will and by leaving the ECHR, we can solve this.

I promise the Labour Government one thing. This issue caused great pain to the Conservative party, and it had an impact in the general election. This issue of illegal migration and the crime that it leads to, which is a conversation that has barely started in this country but that in France and Germany is now very big, will do massive damage to Labour’s electoral chances. You are going to have to get tough, and I am afraid your leader is going to have to rethink his position on the ECHR.