T is for trouble in The Channel ...

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33 people/asylum seekers drowned in the English Channel when their flimsy inflatable boat sank in icy seas last month. There was political uproar. Post Brexit and the border has moved to the middle of the English Channel and the U.K has closed many asylum routes from Europe , encouraging people to take the risky journey, and still taking it now, in the winter. It was hoped the boats would slow to a trickle in the winter due to the weather and light but no such luck. France attitude is if these people want to go to England then let them take the hazardous journey and so not making much effort to stop the boats, police leaning on their vehicles and smoking a cigarette as the boats push off from the beach. They don’t even stop the ones with little kids on. Because these migrants can claim asylum in any European Union country they travel though, any parent putting a young child on those boats should go to jail. They can live in France. The U.K and French attitude to this crisis is appalling; let them drown as a deterrent the attitude. 23,000 plus have died in the Mediterranean Sea making the crossing their and crossings doubling every year in the Channel, up to 1000 a day in the summer. Channel deaths will increase next year. Post Covid and asylum claims had fallen to the U.K in the wider picture but governments all around the world always afraid to help asylum seekers as it encourages more to come. Just after the Syrian Civil War, Sweden offered sanctuary and one third of asylum seekers in Europe then headed to the Arctic Circle, the welfare system far better there than Eastern Europe, the obvious pull of Sweden. SO many headed up that liberal Scandinavia locked down their borders soon after. What to do about this people shift is hard politically as Indigenous populations don’t like mass migration to their safer countries and governments can fall. 70% of Austrian prisoners are Easter European migrants. The new Coronavirus strain has arrived on cue so the U.K government can talk about that and not the crisis in The Channel but the boats are still coming in horrible weather. There is a sense of entitlement in the voices of the asylum seekers in France that the U.K is a better deal for them, most that travel, young men. But whatever its wrong to allow children to make that crossing.