It’s time UK media reminded Farage how we got into this mess in the first place - BREXIT!

Five years ago, I went into the channel, I filmed dinghies coming across, I told everybody there'd be an invasion and vast numbers would come and I was laughed at. Well, have a look at that. It's now two hundred thousand. Well, let's just sit on a shelf for a moment. The fact that the figure Farage is talking about is over a period of several years and remind ourselves how we got into this mess in the first place. I would gently point out to Nigel Farage and others that before we left the EU, we had a returns agreement with every country in the EU, and he told it, he told the country make no difference if we left. But he was wrong about that. These are Farage boats, in many senses, that are coming across the channel. Under a mechanism known as the Dublin Convention, the British government could previously ask fellow EU nations to take people back if they had passed through safe countries en route to the UK. That ended with Brexit and no alternative was agreed, making it far more difficult to return any new arrivals. Don't just take my word for that. Here is Tory shadow home secretary Chris Philp, who back in 2020 was the immigration minister. Because we're out of the European Union now, we are out of the Dublin three regulations, and so we can't any longer rely on sending people back to the place where they first claimed asylum. When we did check it out just before we exited the EU transitional arrangements on December the 31st, 2020, we did run some checks and found that about half the people crossing the channel had claimed asylum previously elsewhere in Europe, in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, somewhere like that, and therefore could have been returned. But now we're out of Dublin, we can't do that. And that's why we need to have somewhere like Rwanda that we can send these people to. Former Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron has also suggested Britain can no longer return channel migrants to France because of Brexit. I'm someone who says we have a problem with illegal migration. You cannot have a situation where boat after boat crosses the channel, leaving a perfectly safe country, France, and coming to another perfectly safe country, Britain. You just can't have that. And so you have to be creative and inventive, and that's what the Rwanda policy is. And hand on heart, if this had come up when you were PM, would you have gone for this policy? Well, we'd had a totally different situation, because we had a situation where you could return people directly to France. Now, I'd love that situation to be the case again. That's the most sensible thing. People land on a beach in Kent, you take them straight back to France, you therefore break the model of the People's Fund. So shouldn't you be trying to get that? Well, that's not available at the moment. It's simply not possible at the moment. Because of Brexit? Well, because of the situation we're in, because of the attitude of others, and all the rest of it. And if all that's not enough for you, a study by Durham University found the primary factor in the skyrocketing number of small boat crossings was the former Conservative government's decision to leave the European Union without a returns agreement in place. Here are some of the report's key findings. The primary factor behind small boat crossings is the UK's lacking a returns agreement with the EU. The government never assessed the impact of the consequences for leaving the EU without a returns agreement to replace the Dublin regulation and was caught by surprise. And now Farage has this message for voters. Policy is very simple. You vote for a reform MP, you will not have a detention facility in your constituency. But if you vote Green, or those that support open borders in the world, that's where the detention centres are going to be. It's shocking and shameless grotesque bullying which shows nothing but contempt for voters. In threatening to punish those parts of the country where people don't vote his way, the Reform Party leader is betraying the basic principles of democracy. So please remember all this next time you hear the Reform UK leader say things like this.