Nigel Farage turns to Tony Abbott to stem flow of asylum-seekers

In 10 days more than 1000 asylum-seekers have landed at Dover. The issue is starting to bite Boris Johnson.

Migrants picked up while crossing the English Channel are brought into Dover last week. Picture: AFP

Off eastern England the weather has been sunny and the seas calm: perfect conditions for illicit crossings of the English Channel from Calais to Dover — by speed boat, motorised rubber dinghies and even the odd kayak.

So every day for weeks there has been a pre-dawn ritual, where scores of young fit men, and occasionally families, have motored across the 31km channel — a busy shipping lane that represents the tiny final commute for people claiming to have come from Eritrea, Libya, Yemen, Chad, Sudan, Afghanistan and Syria.

In 10 days more than 1000 have landed to be registered by the UK Border Force. Many others have scarpered into migrant communities to work underground in factories and as manual labourers.

On Wednesday a 16-year-old Sudanese boy drowned attempting the crossing.

Home Secretary Priti Patel said the boy’s death was an “upsetting and tragic loss of a young life”.

But as a distracted British population looks to news other than coronavirus, the illicit crossings are beginning to rankle deep into the Boris Johnson government that pushed through Brexit on the back of taking back control of borders from the EU.

It’s becoming a hot issue as the migrants, nearly all of whom have no identity papers, fill up three-and four-star hotels across the Midlands, Kent and even in the constituency of Ms Patel.

Nigel Farage records a video near Dover last week. Picture: AFP

Ms Patel has appointed Dan O’Mahoney, a former marine who served in Kosovo and Iraq to a new position, Clandestine Channel Threat Commander, responsible for making the Channel route unviable for small boat crossings.

For months Nigel Farage from the Brexit Party has been shining a torch on what has been happening in Channel, filming the French coast guard escorting the migrant dinghies to British waters, where they are handed over to the Royal Navy, and then Border Force.

He believes the UK is housing 48,000 illegal migrants in what he describes as “4 star spa hotels’’ costing the UK taxpayer $4bn and which could blow out to $8bn as a result of the “Uber taxi service’’.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott. Picture: Getty Images

He said the UK had paid the French £61m to stop the crossings, which was spent on security fencing around the Eurostar and enhanced checks of lorries, but on the seas, he says the boats are being simply waved across.

“Talk is cheap, the people want action and not empty words,’’ he tweeted.

The local Kent authority has run out of room to house migrant minors. On one day 23 unaccompanied children landed: their families willingly paying as much as $6000 for a child to single-handedly negotiate the UK asylum system. Charities say asylum- seekers are spending up to $12,000 for “gold service’’ transport across the channel in a speedboat.

Mr Farage has sought advice from former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott — who launched Operation Sovereign Borders to turn back migrant boats to Indonesia — on how to stop “the wave’’.

Mr Abbott urged a “hard headed approach’’, saying it would help the UK and France if the French addressed the problem “at its core’’. He said if the British returned the migrants back to France it would quickly send a message to people smugglers that the route across the Channel was closed, and eventually migrants would stop gathering along the French coast.

Mr Johnson says there are a panoply of laws that an illegal immigrant has at their disposal allowing them to stay in the UK, but he has promised legal changes once the Brexit transition period expires at the end of the year. In 2019 only 155 migrants were returned to France.

The UN refugee agency says most migrants seek asylum elsewhere and only “a minority of refugees in Europe attempt to reach the UK’’. The UNHCR said last year France received 123,900 asylum applications, Germany 142,500 and the UK 35,566.

In the meantime Ms Patel has called in the Ministry of Defence to assist with RAF flights to monitor the channel and a warship to assist Border Force with patrols. But unless France agrees to receive the migrants, those that are found become a very British issue.