UK Offers France To Work Together To Prevent Migrant Channel Crossing - Home Minister

Muhammad Irfan Published November 25, 2021 | 07:49 PM

UK Home Minister Priti Patel on Thursday said she had offered her French counterpart, Gerald Darmain, to step up cooperation, including joint patrolling and deploying officers on the ground, to prevent migrants from crossing the English Channel

LONDON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 25th November, 2021) UK Home Minister Priti Patel on Thursday said she had offered her French counterpart, Gerald Darmain, to step up cooperation, including joint patrolling and deploying officers on the ground, to prevent migrants from crossing the English Channel.

"I've literally just spoken again with my French counterpart Minister Darmanin and I've once again reached out and made my offer very clear to France in terms of joint France and UK co-operation, joint patrols to prevent these dangerous journeys from taking place," Patel told Parliament, after 27 people drowned on Wednesday while trying to reach the UK coast on a rubber boat that sank off Calais.

The home secretary said she had also offered Darmanin to put officers on the ground and "do absolutely whatever is necessary to secure the area so that vulnerable people do not risk their lives by getting into unseaworthy boats."

"What happened yesterday was a dreadful shock, it was not a surprise but it is also a reminder of how vulnerable people are put at peril when in the hands of criminal gangs," she stressed.

Patel, an advocate of toughening the United Kingdom's asylum laws, told lawmakers that the UK cannot have a policy "where we can accommodate everyone."

Reacting to her statement, independent lawmaker and former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn urged the Conservative government to address the root of the problem.

"Those asylum seekers are desperate people trying to survive in this world. Pushing them back is not a solution, it is brutality that will go down in history as the brutal treatment of desperate people at a desperate time," Corbyn said.

More than 25,600 people a figure that is more than triple the total for last year as a whole have illegally crossed from France to the UK in 2021, according to official figures.