//NJ seems to be blaming the migrants, who have a legal right to claim asylum here//
No I’m not. I’m blaming the economic migrants who don’t like it too much where they are. They don’t need to claim asylum because they are safe where they are. The fact that the current and previous governments have chosen to go along with the UN and ignore the wording of the Convention they signed simply exacerbates the problem.
//People wanting us to leave the ECHR don’t understand that that organisation gives us British citizen rights; so abandoning them we would be joining the likes of Russia and Belarus.
Don’t be absurd. You seem to be obsessed with requiring protection by supra-national bodies. How many people in this country do you suspect would be denied their rights if we left? Those arriving here by rubber boat do not do so under the auspices of the European Convention, but under the UN Convention. Citizens of places like Australia, New Zealand and Canada do not seem to be suffering a deprivation of their rights and, when I last looked, none of those countries were signatories to the ECHR nor were they signatories to anything similar.
//If we wanted to turn people away, arriving on our shores asking for asylum, we’d probably need to leave the UN too.//
Well since that organisation seems unable to properly interpret its own Convention, written in plain English, that’s probably not a bad idea. The UN is another institution that has largely outlived any usefulness it might once have had.
//Any competent government would process them and then deport them – rather than paying for their extended stay in 4* hotels.//
You know as well as I do that deporting them is simply not a possibility for many of them. Where are they to be deported to? France (from where nearly all of them of them set out) will not have them as they are not French and either will not lodge an asylum claim there or have already lodged one and been denied. Most of them have no papers and refuse to reveal their country of origin and even if they did, those countries would refuse their return.
The only way to deal successfully with illegal migration is to prevent those attempting it from landing here. Nothing else will stop it and the ridiculous notion that people living in France “have the right” to set out in a rubber boat and land on the Kent coast without permission to do so needs to be dismissed forthwith.
If you think this can continue unabated (and it will, regardless of who is in power unless the changes I mention are made), how many people do you think could be reasonably (and comfortably) accommodated in the UK? How much more of its GDP (which, as you go to great lengths to have us believe, is rapidly diminishing since we left the EU) do you think the country should devote to these people? How many people do you suggest the government should employ to examine their claims? How do you square this with the fact that the asylum system is denuding many African and Asian countries of huge numbers of its better off young people (predominantly men) who up sticks, leaving their womenfolk and older or less able relatives to fend for themselves? In the meantime, all the UK and other European countries are doing is to encourage those making the journey believe it is quite OK to do so. It isn’t, and the sooner that is accepted the sooner something will be done to end what will cause untold damage to Europe.