Jenrick: France could stop small boats 'tomorrow'

ODN

Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick says France could halt Channel crossings “tomorrow” if it used UK funding properly. He welcomes a potential returns deal but warns Britain has been “led up the garden path” before. Jenrick calls for rapid deportations and human rights reform to create a “sovereign deterrent” against illegal migration. Report by Covellm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn

Transcript

00:00It's really important that we are good friends and allies with France, but it doesn't always

00:04feel like that at the moment. The French have the potential to stop the small boats tomorrow

00:10if they wanted to. We want to ensure that they use the money that we've given them,

00:15£800 million in recent years, to get the gendarmes, their police officers, onto the

00:20beaches, into the shallow waters, turning back the boats and tackling the people smuggling

00:24gangs. If there's the potential to do a proper returns agreement, then that would be well

00:29welcome. But we've got to see what the details are on that. We've been led up the garden

00:33path by France in the past. The most important thing is to stop people coming in the first

00:39place. And the only way to do that is to have a proper deterrent. So that if you come here

00:44illegally, you are detained upon arrival and you're deported within hours and days, not

00:50months and years. And end the merry-go-round of legal claims by changing our human rights

00:56laws once and for all. That is the only sustainable way to secure our borders. This is a national

01:02security emergency. It needs to be treated as such. If we can reach further agreements with

01:08France, then that may well have merit.

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