OPINION – JUDY FINNIGAN: We certainly don’t need back-of-the-fag-packet, pub politics like this
Judy Finnigan, left, says smalll boats must be stopped – but Royal Navy’s not the answer (Image: Express / Getty)
I want the small boats stopped as much as most of you do. I want all illegal immigration brought under proper control. I want a sensible, efficient, fair and kind immigration/asylum policy to replace the ramshackle ham-fisted dog’s dinner we’ve got at the moment. I want secure borders. In short, I want the grown-ups back in charge. What I don’t want is back-of-a-fag packet, pub politics the like of which we’ve seen from Reform UK this week.
The party’s proposal to confront incoming rubber dinghies with the Royal Navy’s finest is delusional. Such mid-Channel encounters would be fraught with danger. Reform spokesman Zia Yusuf seemed to think, as revealed in media interviews this week, that it would be a simple matter of transferring would-be asylum seekers to Navy boats, and then taking them back to the French shores they’d just left.
He brushed away suggestions that the practical difficulties of boarding these frail, overloaded craft would be formidable, and that maybe the French would, y’know, not take particularly kindly to British warships barging into their territorial waters. Sure enough, the day after the “send a gunboat” strategy was touted, France stated that it was in plain breach of maritime and international law and that they would not tolerate any violation of French sovereign waters.
As our own Navy has a duty to uphold maritime law, it’s hard to see how any ship’s captain could square that with an order from a Reform-led government to break it. Which didn’t stop Nigel Farage telling French President Emmanuel Macron to, in effect, get lost. Like it or not, our Marines would deliver the illegal would-be immigrants back on the opposite side of the Channel.
This is desperate stuff. Yes, it’s obvious that much stronger measures to stop the boats are absurdly overdue (although the numbers arriving here ARE significantly down year-on-year). But this absurd, chest-beating posturing? It’s not just childish fantasising. It’s embarrassing.
Flies are a summer nightmare
Flies have been everywhere this summer – yuck! (Image: Getty)
So how are you coping with all these flipping flies? Ghastly, isn’t it? This year has seen swarms of them, great ragged squadrons of the things droning and buzzing through bedrooms, bathrooms, and especially the kitchen. It’s a nightmare opening the fridge, isn’t it? If you take more than three seconds to grab what you’re after, they’re straight in there. Worse, if someone has left the fridge door even slightly ajar, you open it to find chilled flies stumbling slowly over the ham, cheese, bacon, spreads… and you must, of course, chuck all of it straight in the bin.
The fly on your food is the fly that may well have just finished feasting on the dog mess on the pavement outside. For E. coli, read E. co-fly. As for hated wasps, I haven’t seen a single one this year – and that’s the problem, apparently. Our heatwave summer has decimated the wasp population and they’re the apex predator of flies. Nature abhors a vacuum. Flies now go where wasps used to tread. You can’t bloody win, can you?