David Cameron’s latest attempt to tackle the deepening Migrant Crisis at the Euro-tunnel involves sending in a few more sniffer dogs. However, the Home Office’s supplier of dogs, Wagtail International, had not even received a call from Whitehall before the Prime Minister made the announced last night, according to Channel 4 News.
The Prime Minister chaired an emergency COBRA meeting with his ministers upon returning from Asia yesterday, but so far he has only promised to send some new fencing to France, which will take weeks to install, and to turn a military base near the tunnel entrance into a lorry park, so the M20 can be cleared.
The migrant crisis on both side of the Channel is currently costing Britain £250 million a day in lost trade.
At one point this month, queues of lorries stretched back eighteen miles into Kent, and delays for haulage drivers are still more that twenty hours. Food is spoiling; orders have been cancelled, diverted and delayed, and insurance companies have already hiked their premiums. Price increases are expected to filter down to consumers within weeks.
The situation is now so bad, and has gone unresolved for so long, that one owner of a British haulage firm based in West Wales, Peter Harding, is calling for a boycott of the tunnel to force the government into taking serious action.
Harding told The Express: “If everybody stopped, because of how the country runs time-sensitive goods, there would be anarchy in the shops.
“That’s what needs to happen to make these governments – not just our Government but the French government – do something seriously about the situation for everybody.”
A spokesperson from the Road Haulage Association said: “It’s not a bad situation in Calais – it’s an intolerable one and it’s only going to get worse.”
His organization is now calling for the French military to intervene to get control of the situation.
When The Express asked if she could sympathies with companies now refusing to send drivers across the Channel, she said: “Absolutely. We’ve had many reports of companies saying they don’t want to make that journey.”
Yesterday, UKIP leader Nigel Farage added to the calls for something proportionate to be done about the crisis. He said: “It is a genuinely dangerous situation. There have been nine migrants killed so far this year and it’s only a matter of time before a British lorry driver gets killed. That’s how serious it is.”
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