Former Deputy Prime Minister and current Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government Angela Rayner faced sharp criticism on GB News after she strongly condemned Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s proposed migrant visa crackdown.
In interviews with The Times and speeches to the centre-left group Mainstream, Rayner argued that it is deeply unfair to retrospectively alter the rules for people who migrated legally. She labelled the retrospective tightening of immigration rules as "un-British" and a "breach of trust".
Security expert responds
Appearing on GB News breakfast, security and intelligence expert Anthony Glees slammed this notion. "Well, I think we should be very concerned. It's not very British to do what these people are doing. Angela Rayner might need to note that," he said.
Despite this, he did acknowledge there were issues with the current situation. "The reason these three crossings at the beginning this week are concerning, are first of all because one was headed for Gosport from Normandy. Now that matters because Normandy is not the area that the boats normally come from. It was detected, and the people were not allowed to land at Gosport, but were taken to Dover, where they could be processed," he pointed out.
Details of the crossings
On September 22, a string of vehicles heralded by blue flashing lights was seen leaving Gosport, Hampshire, making its way along the motorway. It transpired this was a police escort of the buses intended for migrants that were supposed to arrive in Gosport on a small boat on the same day.
However, the 51 migrants aboard the dinghy, who spent 36 hours at sea "in precarious conditions", were eventually intercepted by the RNLI and instead transported "to Dover by water".
National security concerns
"The Normandy point that is serious," Glees said. "Secondly the two other illegal crossings this week are very concerning because they were undetected, and they were crossings that took migrants unlawfully to two of the most carefully surveilled areas in the UK - the area between Folkestone and Dover, where there are all kinds of devices, including large electronic towers, designed to stop precisely this thing from happening.
"So, undetected crossings are a national security threat two ways. First of all, because it lets people into the UK who are uncontrolled, and we know some of the migrants on one of these crossings just scarpered and went off somewhere. They obviously knew where to go, and they for the moment disappeared. Although I suspect the cops will get hold of them."
He added: "The other reason that this is a national security threat is because the smugglers seem to be able to use boats that can evade the defences, the electronic and other defences that we have, and they're moving south towards Normandy, where the Normandy landings took place all those years ago, and possibly even further south. So, even though the channel is not wide one way, if you look at it another way, it covers a huge number of miles, and it's very hard to intensively survey it. So, we've got people in the UK. We don't know who they are, and we don't exactly know how they got here," he said.
