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00:00From there to what is going on in the Channel Sea, it is one of the
00:04biggest challenges that the British government has vowed to get on top of.
00:08Successive British governments, as they come into power, stopping
00:11smuggling gangs from constantly profitable trade and ever-continuing
00:15trade of illegal boat crossings from France to the UK over the Channel
00:19waters. One that has seen the former Conservative party deeply divided
00:24over, its policies almost exploded internally within, plans to stop
00:29illegal stowaways, smugglers routes, claiming it would improve after
00:32Brexit. It didn't. The numbers increased. The Rwanda plan then became
00:35a thing. Sending migrants there, it didn't get off the ground. Huge
00:39legal challenges. The new Labour government are in power. The scale
00:42of that problem, the danger is ever-present. Eight people dying
00:46overnight, trying to cross from northern France in a poorly inflated
00:50rubber boat, packed with around 60 people. A familiar story now. We are
00:55going to speak to two people who know this issue deeply in just a moment.
00:59First, let's hear some of the promises, the rhetoric and the
01:02fallout with different British Prime Ministers over the last decade. We
01:08have already spent money erecting the border fence around the port at
01:12Calais. We are putting in place the border fence outside the tunnel. The
01:17French are sending an extra 120 police. Everything that can be done
01:21will be done to make sure our borders are secure. The point I would
01:25just make to people thinking of making this journey, one, it is very
01:29hazardous. You may think the weather looks great, but it is a very
01:32dangerous thing to do. The second thing is, we will send you back. I
01:35can tell people what I will do with them. I will put them on planes to
01:39Rwanda. 300 years? What will you do with illegal migrants who come from
01:43our country? What will you do with them? It is a simple question. What
01:48will you do with them? They need to be processed at the moment.
01:53Conversation that is still continuing. Labour is now, in fact, as we speak,
01:58the Prime Minister is preparing to go to meet Giorgio Maloney in Italy.
02:03Let's go and talk to two people who have looked at this issue on a wide
02:07level across Europe. Andrew Geddes is in Florence, director of the
02:11migration policy centre at the European University Institute in
02:14Florence. Great to have you on the programme, Andrew. Also on my left,
02:18we have Sally Hayden, journalist at the Irish Times in Dublin. All-World
02:22Prize-winning author, many more I know, Sally, including the prize of
02:27Ireland. My fourth time we drowned is the book, Seeking Refuge on the
02:32World's Deadliest Migration Route, which focused on the Central Med
02:36route. Let's start with you, Andrew. Just listening to that
02:41conversation, the outgoing, well, the last Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak and
02:45Keir Starmer, where do you stand now on what you think Labour are doing and
02:50whether they have a sense of controlling the issue? Well, what
02:56they're proposing or what seems to be inflated at the moment is looking at
03:00the schemes adopted by Italy and what Italy is doing is intercepting people
03:04that see and sending them to Albania. Italy has not actually done anything
03:08to, no people have been sent to Albania at the moment, but what the UK
03:12government is continuing to look at is efforts to what could be called
03:16externalise the issue. So I think that that is, and we look across Europe
03:22and European governments have consistently sought this approach, which
03:25rather than granting territorial access to people who maybe need protection,
03:29is to look at externalising solutions, which essentially consign people to
03:34very dangerous conditions in non-EU member states. And so I think that
03:41seems to be the direction of travel with the UK government at the moment.
03:44Sally, when you listen to the rhetoric, I mean, we had a quick potted
03:48history of 10 years, I think we can go back to probably 20 years of Calais
03:54and crossings, but actually that increase, what do you make of the way
03:58the British government has, governments over the past have tried to handle
04:02the issue, having been there over the years yourself to Calais and wider
04:06routes around Europe too? Yeah, sure. I mean, I haven't reported so much
04:11in Calais since 2015, 2016, 2017. And at that time, I remember speaking
04:18to people who were trying to reach the UK, getting in trucks or getting
04:21in trains. And I actually asked people at that time, you know, what about
04:26boats? Like, would you ever consider trying to cross by boat? And they all
04:30said, no, it's way too dangerous. And so the fact that people are now
04:33making this journey by boat, I think shows how desperate they are and how
04:37impossible other routes have become. And yeah, I get frustrated, I have to
04:43say, kind of seeing the rhetoric around this as painted like a kind of UK
04:49French issue, you know, because actually we really need to look at the scale
04:53of the crises that are happening around the world. And I can talk about this
04:56for ages, but obviously we're on TV, so we don't have a lot of time. But I
05:00read that the survivors of this latest tragedy come from Eritrea, Sudan,
05:05Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Iran. All of those countries have absolutely
05:09devastating crises happening right now, either regarding war, famine, or
05:14repression, you know, and crackdowns on opposition, crackdowns on freedom of
05:20speech. And without centering, without focusing this debate on the wider
05:24issues and the wider reasons why people are fleeing and the scale of the
05:28suffering and those crises, you're really missing most of the actual
05:32picture. And I think that's been one of the problems with these kind of
05:36political rhetoric, the way that politicians speak. It's not actually
05:40looking at the fact that the crisis doesn't go away just because you say,
05:44you know, we want to stop the boats or we want to tackle the smugglers or
05:49whatever. Like smugglers are fulfilling a need. They're fulfilling the need of
05:52people who have no other ways to get to a safe place.
05:57Andrew, is that a point that Sally raises there, the idea that this has
06:01just become, you know, a movable, flowing difference to a cat and mouse
06:06game? It started, you know, go back to eight years, 2016, when we were
06:10talking about the trains, you know, back of stowaway trucks as well, Euro
06:14Tunnel, that changed suddenly to the boats. Now that is a lucrative model.
06:18So the platform became Stop the Boats from the Conservatives and Labour
06:21talking about Stop the Smugglers Gang. That's their big thing. Now, if we
06:25look at it as a British-French issue, and Sally said it's far more
06:29complicated because of what's going on around the world, but to stop the
06:33gangs, when you hear that, is that a feasible method that the Labour
06:37government can actually find is achievable?
06:42Well, it's a powerful slogan and politics, the politics of immigration
06:46has been dominated by powerful slogans, which has often led to unachievable
06:50objectives. If we look at it, we can go back across the world, and the
06:55word, I think, summarises many of the attempts that we're seeing at the
06:58moment is deterrence. There's a continual doubling down on policies of
07:03deterrence. But what that often does is force people into more difficult and
07:07more dangerous routes. And so the problems, in a sense, become worse.
07:11The journeys become more life-threatening. The underlying root
07:15causes, the drivers of people seeking refuge across Europe remain powerful
07:20and constant. And so the rhetoric, in a sense, is significantly divorced
07:27from some of the underlying factors which are causing people to seek
07:31refuge in Europe. And I think that what's happening at the moment is
07:35evident on a global scale in the world's major destination countries,
07:39which are seeking to deter people. And effectively what they're doing is,
07:43through the policies that they're pursuing, is turning what used to be
07:47asylum-seeking pathways or people's right to seek refuge into forms of
07:52illegal or irregular migration. In a sense, we see this irregularisation,
07:56illegalisation of migration becomes more and more difficult to secure
07:59territorial access to Europe. But that doesn't mean that the problems go
08:03away. The people who find themselves subject to extremely difficult
08:07conditions in their countries of origin, who then try to move, find it
08:11almost impossible then to secure access to Europe and, in a sense, fall into
08:14the hands of the smugglers. Smugglers are really the symptom of a much
08:18deeper underlying set of issues. One thing that's worth saying, because you
08:23talked, Sally, about something that goes back to 2016, trains and
08:27stowaways. There was a sense, I think, at the time that there was some
08:30level of success, if that's the right word, that the British government
08:34had managed to ensure there was better policing to start to clamp down on
08:39that problem. I'll give you an example of just perhaps the scale but also
08:43the ease to France 44 viewers and those watching of actually some of the
08:49boats and the success they've had at the moment on the shores. Go back a
08:52few years, 2018. I was investigating this and, like Sally, I spent years
08:56doing documentaries on the problems in Calais. I went to a random beach,
09:02four o'clock in the morning, it's close to Dunkirk. By 4.30, I watched two
09:07massive boats coming to shore, 80 people on board, children on board,
09:11tiny children. We had a decision to make. We called the police because
09:15clearly if something happened, like we heard overnight, eight dead, what's
09:18going to happen? Within two hours went by, the police didn't turn up. There
09:22was no sign of them. So the argument sometimes from the British government
09:26is that this is also a policing issue. Yes, there are wider factors and a
09:29lot of people in the UK would probably think a similar thing. Both of you,
09:33and Sally first, from your experience of covering this, how much of a factor
09:37perhaps could improve with better coordination between policing? I mean,
09:43I think that generally when we hear the word success used by politicians or
09:48by authorities, that coincides with repression and abuse and human rights
09:54abuses of people who are trying to seek safety. And my reporting
09:58specifically has focused on the central Mediterranean. But there, too, we've
10:02heard politicians talking about success. And at the same time, they're being
10:05implicated in likely crimes against humanity when they force people back to
10:09Libya and back to places where they're tortured and locked up and starved and
10:14abused in many different ways. And I think, again, yeah, what we're lacking
10:20is safe and legal routes. And we're lacking empathy as well. And we're kind
10:25of basically dehumanizing people. We're silencing their voices, the people
10:30making these journeys. You know, even the term, even the word migrants, I think
10:34is kind of a distancing tactic so that we don't have to see the tragedy that's
10:38actually happening. And I'm really kind of exhausted by the fact that, you know,
10:43instead of we're talking about policing, instead of talking about the fact that
10:46in Sudan, for example, there's been war since April 2023 and more than 10
10:52million people are displaced.
10:55You're quite right. In al-Fashr at the moment, there's a big issue in the
10:59Sudanese armed forces accidentally shooting one of its own infantry bases
11:04trying to push off against the rapid support force there. But we talk about
11:09this often. We've had guests on this. The issues you quite rightly say are much
11:13wider than that. And I guess for the British government challenge and why we
11:16talk about policing, and I looked at this like you, Sally, in depth, is all
11:21their measures that allow for, yes, we can talk about the government and
11:26policies of legal routes, but to stop an illegal route, Andrew, is Sally right
11:31that you shouldn't look at policing or is actually, are they right to try to,
11:35for the sake of the lives of people trying to cross, try to improve that
11:38situation?
11:40I suppose there's a number of aspects to this, one of which is that I suppose
11:44one of the things that is very corrosive of the politics of immigration is that
11:47for many people looking at the events that they witness in the channel, they
11:50don't see a system. It appears chaotic. It appears that governments have kind
11:54of lost control and that's a very difficult position for governments to be
11:57in. So an aspect of this would be around coordination, which would try to
12:02involve some coordination around border security and border cooperation, but
12:06that cannot be the only aspect of cooperation that takes place. Cooperation
12:10needs to be on a much broader footing at the borders where people in vulnerable
12:14positions need to be protected. That requires some consideration of how the
12:18UK and France could offer some protection for those who are clearly in need of
12:21protection. Many of the people are coming from countries where they will have
12:25valid claims for protection and that does need to be recognised. That needs to
12:29be part of any response as well as the issues around cooperation on border
12:33controls, which probably are necessary if in relation to kind of public support
12:38and public consent for the policies that governments are willing to pursue.
12:41But only focusing on police cooperation is a very narrow way of looking at
12:46these issues. It is, and I think in the context at the moment where, and Sally
12:50picked up on it, you know, we're dealing with a lot of governments that are
12:53centre-right or right-wing or even further than that, where one of the
12:57biggest issues in Europe right now is migration, that conflation between
13:01migrants and problems at home, criminality, and these issues that become,
13:07well, we saw protests over the summer in the UK, at the centre of that, the
13:11places where people, migrants, were staying. Sally, you and I and Andrew can
13:16have these conversations over the years and you must feel like others do, like I
13:20do sometimes, that you can have these similar conversations but we're in a
13:24similar position, if not worse, later. How do you see to the prognosis of this
13:29migration situation in the Channel, particularly, and across Europe too, of
13:34the next six months to a year or so? Getting worse or do you think
13:37governments can start to get a handle on it? Are you optimistic about
13:41Kyostarma, for example? Yeah, I mean, again, the way that you're phrasing
13:46this is like you're saying that success is like stopping people or repressing
13:50people more or kind of causing a greater crisis. No, I think it's more
13:54stopping, it's stopping the deaths at sea and it's stopping problems of
13:58asylum centres, migrant centres being full, it's stopping that, the risk that
14:04people have to take to their lives, isn't it? I think success will be in
14:08terms of people not dying and the smugglers' routes, well, not profiting
14:13on people's lives, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, I think until we recognise that
14:18there's a global inequality crisis that so many people are suffering and that
14:22you can't not feel the ripples of that suffering, even if you're in a
14:26privileged country or a rich country, even if you're in a country like the UK
14:30that's exploited a lot of the world for centuries, you know, now erecting
14:34borders and keeping people out, it doesn't work. And yeah, I'm a
14:39journalist, I don't propose specific policy, but I do say, you know, we need
14:43to actually look at what the reality of the situation is and only by looking
14:47at the channel and not by looking at the broader global situation, you're not
14:50going to see that reality and you're not going to really understand how, you
14:54know, spending money on securitisation and all of this, it's going to
14:58exacerbate the oppression and the suffering and the desperate measures
15:02that people will go to. Sally, good to talk to you. Sally Hayden and
15:06Andrew Geddes as well in Florence. Great to have you both on the programme.
15:10Thank you so much.