Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage has released the full version of a video purporting to show the French authorities transferring a boatload of illegal migrants to the UK Border Force in the English Channel.
Farage, who has reinvented himself as something of an investigative reporter as the ongoing scandal of illegal boat migrants being allowed to land in Britain in now record-breaking numbers, despite the national coronavirus lockdown, put to sea to observe their activities.
While there, Farage observed and recorded, possibly for the first time, the French authorities transferring a boatload of illegal migrants — which they allegedly met in French territorial waters — to the British authorities, who then took them the rest of the way to Britain.
The French should of course intercept and turn back migrant boats detected in their own waters, not escort them to British territory — and many members of the public believe that even migrants who do reach British territory without being detected should be turned around, as they are coming from a safe, first world EU member-state.
Farage noted that many lifeboatmen — often roped into operations meeting illegal migrant boats and bringing them ashore when Border Force cutters are not available — have become “disenchanted” with their lifesaving work as a result of the Channel crisis, given much of it has devolved into providing a free “taxi service” for the customers of criminal people-smugglers.
Transponder data from UK & French coastguards proves @Nigel_Farage isn't just right about France escorting illegal migrants into British Waters yesterday, but they did so on Saturday as well. When will @pritipatel @BorisJohnson act? My report on the data: https://t.co/fVjq3KwU4t pic.twitter.com/wgjW9bEop1
— Oliver JJ Lane (@oliver_lane) May 21, 2020
Oliver Lane, lead editor at Breitbart London and a former OSINT researcher at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies, verified the Brexit Party leader’s accusations by examining ship transponder data — which also confirmed that the French had escorted a migrant boat to Pett Level on the Sussex coast on May 16th.
The revelations will come as a source of substantial embarrassment to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel, who have been paying the French government millions of pounds to strengthen immigration enforcement on their side of the Channel — evidently to little effect, and without much British pushback for their failure to stop people-smugglers from using the French coast as a launchpad to Britain.
UK: Only 15 Per Cent of Boat Migrants Are Sent Back As Iranian Illegal Immigration Surges https://t.co/m8sj3ga2Vw
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) January 20, 2020
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