Not an easy one to crack is it. The French, on the one hand, are more than happy for their migrants to leave France, once gone they dont want them back. Any idea of opening a Consulate in Calais that can process asylum claims backed up by an ability to send back to France anyone who doesn’t use that system.. well that idea is dead before it starts.
Way too much money in it to even think that organised crime won’t pile in to profit from human misery.
Zero chance that any government will offer free and safe passage to anyone who wants it.
Little ability to return failed asylum seekers to their home countries.
An all up £10 billion bill per year.
Yet I’ve met no one who thinks that crossing the channel in small boats is a good idea… even if they think that for different reasons.
The irony of Brexit. It effectively took Britain out of the Dublin Agreement, which allowed some illegal immigrants to be returned to the first EU country they entered. So Leaving the EU clearly made sending people back into Europe more difficult and legally more complicated.
And it’s reform that are moaning
I haven’t checked the numbers but off the top of my head ISTR they absorb several times the number of migrants that we do. So they have zero sympathy for our position. I imagine they think “There’s a real continent-sized problem here and once again the fucking British are refusing to pull their weight”.
When I was at work we were often involved with EU-funded projects, or simply with European collaborations, and even then some at least of the French saw us as reluctant to commit completely to anything. I don’t remember anyone ever saying so out loud in relation to work, but I do remember the point once being made in a political context.
We had all had a pretty long day and we ended up in some meeting venue bar and the chat turned to some problem or other with the euro which was then in its early days. I forget the detail but I might have said that I was glad the UK hadn’t joined. One of the French contingent wasn’t impressed and raised her voice. She felt we wanted all the benefits of EU membership without doing any of the heavy lifting. I think the word ‘disgraceful’ might have been used. I was younger and more junior then or I might have said that we could all have shared the benefits but some (OK, almost all) of ‘us’ had decided to add a bunch of problems to the mix, and then to start grumbling when the bad idea had turned out to be A Bad Idea.
Instead I just let her vent in public. But it opened my eyes a bit to how the French seemed to see us.
Well … I accept that there is an argument to be had about that. I’m not a historian, or should it be political scientist ? So I don’t know whether nations should be ‘obliged’ (whatever that means) to shoulder ‘their share’ (whatever that means) of the world’s ills. At one extreme every nation would pursue its own immediate interests and let the devil take the rest. At the other the 8 billion of us would share what we have equally which, given the unmet demand in much of the world, would see the UK’s stretched but still impressive kidney transplant programme shrink a great deal (not for the want of kidneys but for the want of medics). The arguments include where we set the degree of privilege that the first world has over the third one and how much weight we attach to the former’s ‘responsibility’ for the latter’s problems.
In terms of asylum claims granted, we both reject around half, france granted 74, we granted 54 k last year.
As for general immigration i seen to remember the last year under the Tories was in excess of half a million, 750k rings a bell, but that included students and this acting on rights, such as Hong Kong.
France was nett +176k and some 325k residency granted in 2025. I dont know who they include in their figures.
It’s true if you went back a few years or figures were lower, but so were France’s, whoes figures are complicated by their ex colonies and rights to French citizenship etc etc.
Overall, i dont think we are so different. We do have similar issues with Populist parties though.
And the runners and riders are off… Streeting leads by a resignation, Burnham still looking for a horse and Raynor has paid the entry fee allowing her to join the race.
Sandwich man expected to join in and a lone rider, currently on Everest , heading for the stable block.
Quiet amusing how they think that once in Parliament he’s a shoo-in for the leadership election. Maybe they should ask David Milliband how that went for him.
I agree that the man may well be more popular and maybe even, with the Labour Party, the policies, but I very much doubt a Socialist PM would be popular with Joe Public in this economic / political climate.
