Calais migrants ‘willing to die’ to come to Britain, says French port’s mayor
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Version 0 of 1. More than 2,500 migrants who are “willing to die” to come to Britain are currently in Calais, the mayor of the French port has told MPs. Natacha Bouchart, the centre-right UMP mayor of Calais, told the Commons home affairs committee during a special evidence session that part of the problem was that the British government had done nothing to tell potential migrants that there was no ‘El Dorado’ for them in the UK. Her claim that Britain had a far more favourable benefits regime was immediately challenged by Downing St, who said they were addressing such “pull factors”. Bouchart said that the situation in the town was now far worse than 10 years ago when the Sangatte red cross camp was closed down because it was considered a magnet for migrants. Bouchart said that the nature of the migrants, many of whom came from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Syria and Egypt, was changing. They were becoming more violent with more mafia-types and people traffickers among them. She claimed that they were desperate to reach Britain because they had heard that asylum seekers received £36 a week subsistence in the UK. The special evidence session was conducted through an interpreter but suffered communications difficulties, with British MPs showing little knowledge of French and the Calais mayor displaying little knowledge of English. She appealed to British MPs to get the UK border control moved from Calais back to Dover and said the cause of the problem lay in the failure of European Union asylum and migration policies. Asked by committee chairman Keith Vaz whether the transfer to Calais of fencing used to protect the last G8 meeting in Newport, south Wales, had helped the problem, she said: “Fences just make everybody laugh. They just push back the problem a few metres.” The mayor of Calais alarmed British MPs when she said she welcomed on humanitarian grounds an initiative from François Hollande to establish a new reception centre in Calais which would ensure they were in one place rather than squatting throughout the urban areas of the city. She said that currently the population of Calais faced crime and harassment from the migrants, with mothers afraid to let their children out into the streets. But the prospect of a new Sangatte alarmed both Labour and Tory MPs who said it would provide a new “magnet for migrants” to go to Calais to try to get into Britain. Conservative and Labour MPs both blamed the French authorities for failing to enforce their own internal borders. At one point Ian Austin, the Labour MP for Dudley North, accused the French mayor of taking the easy option by allowing them to come to Britain instead. Conservative MP Michael Ellissuggested that Britain should take no responsibility for the problem of migrants in Calais because the British government had had no authority in the city since the French regained control in 1558. But when Liberal Democrat MP Julian Huppert told Bouchart that studies had shown welfare benefits were no more generous in Britain than in France and suggested that the very slow asylum system in France might be the root cause, she replied: “Studies are one thing, reality is different.” A Downing Street spokeswoman said: “Clearly, one of this government’s focuses in this area is to look at what are the pull factors around immigration and how we can address them. “We have under this government introduced a three-month delay before EU jobseekers can access jobseeker’s allowance or child benefit or child tax credit. We are limiting jobseeker benefits to only six months, and we will shorten that to three months in the future. Entitlement to housing benefit (has been) removed from EU jobseekers. “What we are seeing across the board with the measures we are taking on immigration is that non-EU net migration is close to its lowest level since 1998. “We have also been working with the French. One of the things we’ve done is a 12 million investment by the UK to bolster security and infrastructure in Calais.” |