The French must be held to account for this

Why?

100% spot on. Terrible tragedy. RIP

Just tragic.

Awful. Can’t imagine the horror.

Does anyone know the reason why the French police sat and watched these poor people board a dinghy and set sail without doing anything about it? Absolutely disgraceful. Imagine if it was the English police that did that.

Here we ate 20 years on with the same issues. The French and English goverments playing power games instead of working together and coming to a resulotion to stop things like this happening.
The most sad thing is that there are people making money out of these people miserery and desperation.

How is it illegal? I understand that the government is planning to make it illegal, but presumably it is not at present.

People smuggling isn’t illegal?

People smuggling is, claiming asylum isn't.

I post this in the hope that some people will be educated by it.

And also because it makes Julia Hartley Brewer look ludicrous.

https://twitter.com/miffythegamer/st...252989442?s=21

Yes I am aware of that.

My question was ‘does anyone know why the French police stood and watched these people get into a dinghy and set sail’. It was quite clear and obvious what these people were doing, why weren’t they stopped?

I don’t think that’s an unreasonable question to ask. There would be plenty asking it if these poor people had boarded a dinghy in Dover under the watchful eye of the English police, would there not?

She is one of the populist hard of thinking.

That was a different dinghy. Channel 4 filmed the incident and that particular dinghy arrived safely.

The uk policy on only allowing asylum victims to claim asylum on uk soil is disgraceful when we refuse to make safe passage for asylum seekers. With a below zero net immigration status it is a policy engineered to appeal to brexiteers and gammons.

Not difficult to do for people with a decent knowledge of the actual facts of the horrific situation. Sadly, due to the general level of knowledge in the population, the like of JHB, Patel etc etc exploit that situation to stoke outrage and political advantage.

Makes you wonder what their take on Kindertransport or the Ugandan refugees would have been? They’d probably have told the Jewish refugee children to have stopped in France…

In that scenario, what powers would the UK OB have to stop a boat leaving Dover?

The point remains though. It seems unlikely to me that a dinghy setting sail from Calais to UK with migrants on board wouldn’t have people smugglers involved. You would expect the French police to intervene on that basis would you not?

The French and UK govts need their heads banging together to sort this out. The fact they can’t sort out who’s allowed to go fishing where, doesn’t give me a lot of hope they will.

If those people were being smuggled out? If they found 30 people in the back of a lorry at Dover, would they simply waive it on to the ferry?

Agreed, and Patel’s needless and shameless addition of “French waters” when describing this tragedy was a blatant attempt to shift the blame for this tragedy away from these shores.

Rather than attempt to find a solution she simply seeks to shift the blame.

And as we can see people are falling for it already.

Interesting stats that the government likes to brush under the carpet in this -

https://www.unhcr.org/uk/asylum-in-the-uk.html

The whole situation is horrendous from every angle and needs a truly international response which sadly will never come. A glance at the stats in the UNHCR piece for example shows that Iraq (which we are to a degree culpable for making relevant) is not the main source of asylum seekers.

The whole government mantra of being overwhelmed etc is provable bullsh*t. Yet their only solution remains criminalisation of the people at peril and a “harsh regime”.

Because the British will not grant safe passage for asylum seekers it won’t be sorted out. See asylum seekers in Calais as we do British passport holders (as if it were British soil) and there would be no need for people smugglers or dinghies.