Just when you think things cannot get any worse, illegal migration across the Channel now seems to have got so bad that the Government is relying on the weather to bring the numbers down.
Last Friday more than 800 illegal migrants successfully made the crossing. That was the highest daily total this year. But it also stood out in the stats because choppy waters had delayed crossings for a week, allowing some officials to pretend the problem was on the way to being solved. I sometimes wonder if this Government will be reduced to simply praying to the sky gods to solve this problem. Because otherwise it seems that they are out of ideas.
It’s really very simple: the only way to stop illegal immigration is to either repel people at your borders or deport them when they come into the country. Both of these take a minimal amount of political capital to be spent. Both need to be done in the face of small but vocal lobbies of activists who pretend that everyone arriving is a legitimate asylum seeker, namely those who find France insufficiently commodious to their requirements.
All weak governments find it easier to put the problem off for another day. The Conservative Party has been in power for over 13 years. In 2016 some of its members successfully led this country to vote to leave the EU because (among other things) if we remained in the bloc we could not get immigration under control. The country voted to leave, but the Government failed to deliver and get immigration under control, quite the opposite. Indeed, last year saw a record net migration into the UK of 600,000. So the idea that the Conservative Party has the political will to get any of this under control is for the birds.
Read more: Send illegal migrants to Islington – see how liberal opinion likes it then