More action is needed to deal with the dangerous boat crossings that are putting lives at risk. In particular, I mean serious hard work with France on stopping the criminal gangs and preventing the crossings in the first place. So look, we would support any sensible measures that could save lives in the Channel.
But there’s two problems with this. First is the timing of it, where it is a briefing to the Times which government sources are themselves admitting is part of what they describe as Operation Save Big Dog and being about saving the prime minister’s skin rather than a serious approach to the problem.
The second is we don’t really know very much about this, but we do know they have used the navy before, three years ago. At that point, they had two navy vessels that didn’t intercept any boats, and that was stopped.
So we don’t know what would be different this time round and we do need to actually have some more proper, serious information about this, rather than the kind of briefings that we’ve got instead.
