Sir John Redwood has called for Home Secretary Yvette Cooper to crack down on small boat crossings and for UK Border Force to immediately arrest people steering the boats across the Channel.The former Conservative MP criticised current enforcement efforts and branded them "completely unacceptable" during an appearance on GB News.FULL STORY HERE.
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00:00Five. Five people. Bear in mind, in the same time, one person every 15 seconds gets nicked for an ULAZ ticket by Sadiq Khan in London.
00:10We're completely losing the plot. How on earth can the conviction rate be so low?
00:15I can't believe it, because quite often these boats are intercepted and the people are taken off safely by Border Force or by the Lifeboat Service.
00:23They would see who was steering and controlling the engine of the boat, so they should immediately say to the police on arrival,
00:31this is the person you need to arrest because they've clearly been endangering lives at sea and running a people-smuggling racket, and it's just completely unacceptable.
00:40But it's got to the point, has it not, Lord Morris Glassman, where many people think that this is not a law enforcement service, as you can see, Border Force.
00:49It's a rescue service. It's a taxi service.
00:52You know, it's completely out of order. I mean, I've long argued we have to put the Royal Navy into the English Channel.
00:58Sometimes I amuse myself.
00:59But they don't want to do it.
01:01They don't want to do it, but they might have to do it, and that's because we've got to protect our borders.
01:06But they don't want to do it because the rules imposed would make the task impossible.
01:10You've got to look again at how this is organised, and you've got to say to Border Force,
01:15one of your prime duties is to arrest the ringleaders and the drivers of the boats because we need to break this.
01:20I mean, that is the Home Secretary's policy, so why isn't she instructing them to do that?
01:25Conservatives didn't do that.
01:26No. Well, then they were wrong.
01:28But we had a new policy.
01:29They had a policy of deterrence by Rwanda, which was scrapped.
01:33The new policy is to crack down on the gangs.
01:36Well, you can see a member of the gang in each of the boats because they're driving it.
01:41They've probably collected the fares.
01:42They are breaking all sorts of laws, from tax laws to seriously endangering people's lives.
01:48So why aren't we cracking down on that?