Fact-Checking Starmer’s Claim That Brexit Created the Small Boats Crisis

 Keir Starmer has claimed that Brexit created the small boats crisis and the migrant boats should be called ‘Farage boats’. This is nonsense, says David Barrett in the Mail – and even Oxford University’s Migration Observatory agrees. Here’s an excerpt.

Keir Starmer strayed into fantasy when he claimed Channel migrants come to Britain aboard “Farage boats” and cannot be removed from this country due to Brexit.

The Prime Minister’s claim is preposterous and simply not grounded in fact, as even impartial observers agree.

When he referred to pre-Brexit Britain having “a returns agreement with every country in the EU” he was referencing the Dublin Agreement, which was supposed to facilitate asylum seekers being sent back to other European Union countries through which they had travelled.

But, put simply, the Dublin Agreement did not work.

The number of returns from Britain to the Continent which were achieved under the deal were tiny. A few hundred a year.

Oxford University’s Migration Observatory – one of the most respected organisations in the immigration sphere – said in a report published in August that the number returned under Dublin was “an average of 560 a year between 2008 and 2020”.

The academics’ study added: “The impact of Brexit is likely to have been minimal – the decline in returns predates it.”

In the 12 months before the Brexit referendum, the UK removed 468 people under the Dublin convention.

Contrast that with the number of migrants arriving across the Channel from northern France – which are routinely hundreds and sometimes more than 1,000 a day – and you can see Starmer’s argument already begin to disintegrate....<<<Read More>>>...