Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp has claimed that the undetected arrival of two small boats carrying illegal migrants last week shows that Shabana Mahmood “has no control of our borders”.
He told The Camilla Tominey Show on GB News: “It does show that Shabana Mahmood has no control of our borders, with these boats making it all the way across undetected. There may be others, as you rightly say.
“Now, last week was a shocking week. You had the two undetected crossings you’ve mentioned. We had a boat crossing from Normandy crossing towards the Isle of Wight, the longest ever crossing, and in just three days last week – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday – over 1,000 illegal immigrants entered the country.
“And I understand that as we speak, as we stand here, I stand here speaking now, there are two or three additional boats crossing the English Channel right now. So Shabana Mahmood has got no control of the border whatsoever.
“The French Interior Minister Monsieur Nuñez admitted a couple of days ago that the French gendarmes that we pay for have orders to stand around doing nothing and not intervening. I personally witnessed that just a few weeks ago on the beaches. They’re doing nothing to stop these boats.
“There is only one solution to this, which is to do what the Australians did about 13 years ago: leave the ECHR and deport all of these illegal immigrants within a week of arrival, and then the crossings will pretty quickly stop.”
Philp declined to commit to scrapping Labour’s inheritance tax and NIC rises: “I’m not going to announce new tax policy on your programme, as much as I would love to. You’ll have to wait and see in the future to hear about those issues.
“But you are right to say that the national insurance increase on employers is crippling – a £25 billion increase in National Insurance, which Labour are then basically spending on welfare increases, which is ridiculous. It’s making businesses go bust.
“So, in my constituency, there’s a bakery chain called Coughlans Bakery, which has gone. The Shadow Chancellor, I’m sure, will be bringing forward ideas in this area in due course. But I was just saying, in my constituency, Croydon South, a chain of bakeries called Coughlans, trading for nearly 100 years, went bankrupt recently, losing 170 jobs. And the guy that runs it, Sean, directly said that was as a result of Labour’s National Insurance and business rate increases.
“This high-tax government is destroying jobs, is making successful people leave the country and go elsewhere. It is a catastrophe, and the next Conservative government is going to reverse the high tax catastrophe.
“We’ve already explained some of those taxes that we’re going to cut, and I’m sure you’re going to hear more in the future.”