Calais is back in the news with the British government's latest attempt to externalise it's migration controls. Plans are afoot to try and rush through a new agreement to build a new large sized detention centre in the Calais area to supplement the Croquelles CRE, ahead of a planned UK-French immigration summit at the end of next month.
Having already won a major victory over the poor deluded Rosbifs with the closure of Sangatte in 2002*, Sarkozy is planning on stiffing les Rosbifs with the majority of the bill for the new detention centre. This detention centre would also be a staging point for mass deportation flights back to Iraq and Afghanistan, this is despite the UK being left standing at the altar the last time that they tried to organise a joint deportation flight back to Afghanistan with the French**
The Labour Party's own junior Enoch Powell, Phil Woolas, broke the news at Monday's session of the Home Affairs Select Committee, "We want to increase the profile of the deportations because we have to get the message back to Afghanistan and Iraq that Britain is not the Promised Land." Clearly the Labour Party no longer plan to build Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land. Well atleast not for Johnnie Foreigner anyway.
This may also explain the strange 'humanitarian' noises that we reported on 13 March as emanating from Eric Besson. He was obviously trying to sugar in advance a particularly bitter pill for the migrants and the support groups in Calais.
*Basically Sarkozy, who was the French immigration minister at the time, managed to not only get the UK to take the lion's share of the migrants in Sangatte at the time of it's closure, to pay for most of the £4.9M fence around the SNCF depot at Frethum at the same time and to greatly tighten the UK's immigration policy, but he also managed to set a right-wing agenda for the French immigration debate and ultimately landed himself the French presidency.
**see: the 18 Nov 2008 post
1 comment:
Eric Besson would have refused for the momment any talk on the subject, that is to say any direct answear to the Home Office. All french eyes seems to be looking with stupefaction at this little town of the north as "Welcome" a movie released last week on Calais and the humanitarians working with migrants is hiting the box office!
J-C lenoir's (from Salam) trial have been reported in that context and it is possible to think that the Home Office will have to wait that the mediatic storm passes by before receiving any echoe to its proposal from the other shore of the Channel.
French media coverage (non exhaustive):
http://www.20minutes.fr/article/312165/Lille-londres-veut-un-camp-a-calais.php
http://www.francesoir.fr/societe/2009/03/19/immigration-confusion-sur-la-creation-d-un-nouveau-sangatte.html
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iSCiQbeJCiVBntncB27ggy5axmzQ
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