🚢🇫🇷➡️🇬🇧Reports, eyewitness accounts and video footage have fuelled an increasingly uncomfortable accusation about what is happening in the English Channel: French authorities monitor migrant boats as they head out from France, they travel towards the middle of the Channel, and British rescue services then end up bringing people into the UK.
If that account is accurate, perhaps somebody in government could explain why we are still pretending this is a sensible way to move human beings across one of the busiest shipping lanes on Earth.
Because if the eventual outcome is predictable enough — France on one side, Britain on the other, and vulnerable people sitting in an overloaded inflatable boat between them — then surely we have reached the point where somebody should ask the obvious question:
Why not just run a bloody ferry? 🚢🎟️
🚕The World’s Most Dangerous Alleged Taxi Rank
Videos have shown French rescue personnel monitoring migrant departures and, in some cases, distributing lifejackets while heavily loaded boats head towards Britain. French authorities also intercept and prevent many crossings, so this is not evidence that every boat is deliberately escorted halfway across the Channel.
But the allegation being made is more specific — that on some crossings French vessels accompany or monitor boats far enough into the Channel that British agencies subsequently take responsibility.
And when an RNLI lifeboat arrives, what exactly do people expect the crew to do?
Leave families sitting in an overcrowded inflatable in the middle of a major shipping lane because Westminster and Paris cannot agree what should have happened twenty miles earlier?
Of course not.
The RNLI says its crews launch when tasked by HM Coastguard and that their responsibility is to save people who are in danger, regardless of nationality or immigration status.
So directing fury at the lifeboat crew misses the target spectacularly.
The RNLI is doing the job it has been sent to do.
The bigger question belongs to the governments running the system.
If officials know that people are leaving France in unsuitable inflatable boats…
If French vessels are watching them at sea…
If British authorities know they are coming…
And if somebody is eventually going to have to pull them out of that dinghy and bring them somewhere safe…
Then why are governments allowing the dangerous little rubber boat to remain the middleman? 🤡🛟
This isn’t only an immigration argument.
It’s a safety argument.
These boats are overcrowded. The Channel is freezing, unpredictable and packed with commercial shipping. People have died making these journeys. RNLI crews themselves describe rescuing children, babies and exhausted passengers from unstable and damaged boats.
If there really is a repeatable pattern in which authorities on both sides know roughly where these boats are going and British rescue services ultimately collect the occupants, then governments should be forced to explain why they tolerate a process that puts passengers and rescuers into unnecessary danger.
You can argue all day about who should be allowed into Britain.
You can argue about asylum law, borders, deportation and France’s responsibilities.
But surely nobody seriously believes putting scores of people into an inflatable dinghy and letting the English Channel sort out the paperwork represents competent government.
If politicians ultimately intend to receive people in Britain, create a controlled system.
If they intend to prevent entry, enforce that policy lawfully.
But this bizarre arrangement where everybody watches an overloaded dinghy bob across the world’s busiest shipping lane until somebody needs rescuing is neither an immigration policy nor a humanitarian policy.
It’s governmental buck-passing with an outboard motor. 🚤📋
🔥Challenges🔥
Here is the question politicians on both sides of the Channel should answer:
If reports of this relay-style process are true, why are people being allowed to make the dangerous sea journey at all?
And why should RNLI volunteers be abused for arriving at the end of a situation that governments had every opportunity to prevent at the beginning?
The lifeboat crew didn’t design the immigration system.
They didn’t launch the migrant boat.
They didn’t write British or French border policy.
They turned up when somebody was in danger — because that’s their job. 🛟
💬 So put the anger where you think it belongs. Tell us in the BLOG comments: if governments know these crossings are happening, should there be a controlled legal transfer system rather than people being sent across the Channel in inflatable boats?
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The best comments will be included in the magazine. 🎯📝
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