They're not fleeing a war zone. They're coming from Calais

A Labour MP has decided that the migrant crisis is the product of “white colonisation”. I was asked to respond, and the basic facts of the matter are as clear as day for anybody willing to see.

These people are not coming from somewhere more dangerous than France, the country I went to on my holidays this summer, along with several million other Brits. They are not fleeing anything. They are coming from Calais. That is fact number one, and it discredits them as refugees. It places them, instead, in the category of criminals: people entering our country without any plausible excuse or reason.

So treat them accordingly. Arrest them and hold them in secure pop-up accommodation of the kind we threw up almost overnight for the Nightingale hospitals during Covid, on an uninhabited Scottish island, if necessary. Not inhumane conditions. Reasonable ones. But no benefits, no phone, and no chance of slipping off to work cash-in-hand in a nail bar or a car wash. Leave our international obligations if that’s what it takes, and get them out. Do that and you restore the deterrent, and you crash the business model the people smugglers are advertising online right across the Middle East and Africa.

The reason no government will do any of this was contained in that MP’s slip of the tongue. He is so obsessed with our colonial history, so convinced that our sins require some kind of payback, that he would greet with open arms whichever young men are strong enough to risk their lives crossing the Channel. It is time we respected our own borders, our own people and our own taxpayers instead.

None of this makes me an opponent of immigration as a whole. I am against mass immigration and illegal immigration. Britain should choose who it offers refuge to — people who will settle here and assimilate properly — rather than leaving an open door to all and sundry.

I also discussed the record number of foreigners now claiming benefits in this country, up 20,000 in a year, and why the bond markets are punishing Britain for its political dysfunction rather than its economics.

The full clip is above.