Sort this influx
FOR years the liberal orthodoxy has been that Channel-crossing migrants were uniformly desperate innocents escaping persecution and death.
Anyone who sought to challenge this assumption was immediately shot down as heartless and racist.
It was an orthodoxy — like so much of the dangerous group-think currently tearing apart our public services — which crushed any debate while doing precious little to tackle the problem.
Now we are in a full-blown border crisis with crossings topping 18,000 already this year and up to 700 people a day climbing into small boats to get here.
It is undeniable that some of those who travel tens of thousands of miles to Dunkirk and Calais and pay the gangs in the hope of reaching Britain do so at enormous risk and out of desperation to escape conflict and terror.
But the leaking of a UK defence intelligence report reveals migrants from war-torn countries like Syria and Iraq are, in fact, a minority.
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Instead huge numbers of Albanians are using connections in organised crime to smuggle themselves in illegally.
No doubt downtown Tirana is a poverty-stricken and tough place to live in and the UK’s major cities — despite the best efforts of the Bank of England to plunge us into recession — will be a rosier economic alternative.
But why on earth should we accept this? Britain is a tolerant nation, willing to offer support to those who need it.
It is a scandal that 25,000 genuine refugees who fled the murderous Taliban regime in Afghanistan remain trapped in cramped hotel rooms in overcrowded UK towns unable to live or work freely.
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Meanwhile, our Border Forces and Royal Navy are plucking young Albanian men from dinghies and handing them blankets, Domino’s pizzas and putting them on free buses to London.
Priti Patel’s Rwanda policy can’t come soon enough.
We must hope whoever becomes Prime Minister has the guts to make it work.
Hose at fault?
FOR two years during the pandemic, ministers came on the airwaves and told us what to do.
We were forced to accept much of this because Covid was a serious disease and people were dying.
Yet it appears the Government remains addicted to controlling our social behaviours.
Environment Minister George Eustice is the latest, yesterday citing hot weather and drought conditions to call for nationwide hosepipe bans and ordering water companies to fine us up to £1,000 for improper use.
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How about he fines those firms for the billions of litres they collectively waste every year while making hundreds of millions of pounds in profit?
Easier to come after the little people though, isn’t it?
