There’s something reassuring about Nigel Farage’s promise to stop the boats by sending in the Navy to return rescued migrants forcibly to France before they can land here. The migrants wouldn’t have much to complain about. If they genuinely want to be rescued at sea – rather than levy moral blackmail on the UK government – they can’t complain at being deposited back where they came from. And after all, what is a navy for if not to, well, stop boats invading our shores?
Unfortunately, scratch the surface and things get much less simple.
The first thing is that it’s not clear the Navy has the ships. It’s all very well to talk of using landing craft or River-class patrol boats: but we don’t have many of either. And one suspects they are not well-suited to being run as essentially prison transport vessels carrying large numbers of potentially mutinous foreigners. Even versatile inflatables, of which we do have a fair number, might have their work cut out gently propelling an overloaded dinghy full of people who did not wish to be propelled through a choppy Channel.
There’s also severe doubt whether the Navy would have the will. The last time it carried out a sustained anti-migration operation, against would-be Zionist immigrants off the Palestine coast in the late 1940s, it had difficulty enough forcibly boarding larger ships in order to divert them, and viewed the operation with distaste. With smaller vessels in the Channel which can’t practically be boarded – not to mention an increasingly critical world looking on at what some might see as a flagrant breach of human rights – such dissatisfaction would appear in spades.
