At least 12 people, mostly women, have been killed in an unseaworthy boat attempting to gain access to the United Kingdom’s southern border.
The death toll of migrants attempting to break into Britain tragically rises again, as smugglers cram people into unseaworthy boats in return for considerable sums of money, a trade which has been described as “appalling and callous”. At least 12 people were killed when a rubber smuggler’s boat broke up in the English Channel on Tuesday.
British broadcaster the BBC states ten of those who died were women or girls, and six were minors. At least one of those women was pregnant. It is stated the migrants, who were apparently travelling to the United Kingdom as part of the vast smuggler’s trade in humans across Europe bidding to escape normal border controls, were “primarily of Eritrean origin”.
French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said of the “terrible shipwreck” that the provisional toll stood at 12 dead, two missing, and “several injured”.
Referring to a common French criticism of the United Kingdom — that it implicitly condones people smuggling by not tackling its shadow economy that employs illegal migrants — Darmanin said today: “We need a treaty – a migration treaty between the UK and the European Union – because the people who go now [are] people from the core of Africa who want to go to the UK and they want to join their families and they actually work in conditions that would not be accepted [in] France. And so we really do need to work together to stop these things happening.”
Britain’s new Labour government had promised, in the run up to the election which it won earlier this year, that it would tackle the irregular migration problem by “smashing the gangs”. They came in for criticism this afternoon from former Conservative Home Secretary James Cleverly, who said just talking about it was not enough, and action had to be taken, a bold statement given the boat migrant problem started and flourished under the watch of his Tory government in the past decade.
Rather than considering whether the United Kingdom is indeed a soft touch for migrant smuggler gangs, senior Labour figures blamed the poor quality of trafficker boats for the deaths. Newly installed Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said: “The gangs behind this appalling and callous trade in human lives have been cramming more and more people on to increasingly unseaworthy dinghies, and sending them out into the Channel even in very poor weather.
“They do not care about anything but the profits they make, and that is why – as well as mourning the awful loss of life – the work to dismantle these dangerous and criminal smuggler gangs and to strengthen border security is so vital and must proceed apace.”
Her government colleague, the Border security and asylum minister, Dame Angela Eagle also toed this line, adding: “The quality of boats is deteriorating, so these crossings are getting more and more dangerous as time goes on.”
