Kit Malthouse MP has urged the Government to implement a new system where Channel migrants could be swapped with genuine refugees from France.
The former Secretary of State for Education claimed “the basic principle” of which everything the UK Government has done so far in the channel “seemingly hasn’t worked”.
The Conservative MP for North West Hampshire told GB News: “Turns agreements, the threat of Rwanda, if we ever get that off the ground, military cooperation in the Channel, none of it has worked. The numbers just seem to increase and the truth is that’s because these gangs that traffic people are running a business. And what they do is, if we change the nature of the game and the Channel, all they do is lower their price or raise their prices depending on the risk.”
The MP believes the government needs to create a “certainty that nobody is able to cross”.
Speaking to Esther McVey and Philip Davies he explained: “The only way we’re able to do that is to have a situation where everybody who does cross gets immediately returned to France. Now the question in many people’s mind will be how do we persuade the French to accept those people in return? Well, I think the only way we could persuade them is to say, look for everyone we return to France, we will accept a genuine refugee within France who wants to be settled in the UK. Now you might think that means we’re no worse off the numbers. That’s right. But in truth, if that means nobody bothers to cross the channel, because they know they are going to get returned 100% of the time, then we wouldn’t have to do any of these swaps at all. The paradox is that by promising to do this exchange, we wouldn’t actually have to do it because nobody would bother. And that to me looks like the only sure-fire way we can bring a short-term solution to this problem.”
Asked how the UK would question whether or not a refugee was “genuine”, MP Malthouse explained: “The first thing to say is that we know the gangs that are trafficking react quite quickly. We’ve seen a ramp-up in the numbers over the last two years really. We’ve seen, particularly when the Rwanda scheme was in the headlines, a little change in behaviour almost immediately, not a reduction in numbers but a reduction in the number of people actually claiming asylum.
People were landing on the beach and just saying they were illegal immigrants.
“I think it would just be a matter of months before the numbers dropped like a stone. You would only have to see a few weeks of people being returned home – 100% of the time – and the word would get back that isn’t worth paying for. France has a population of about half a million plus refugees already there. We could operate a scheme where people will apply to be on the waiting list effectively, who want to come to the UK instead. And then we can take our time to vet and settle them in a much more controlled way than we currently do.”
