GB News sparked fury with its latest segment on small boat migrants, as Conservative MP and shadow home secretary Chris Philp appeared live from northern France. He was on the beach where a swarm of migrants were preparing to board dinghies to sail across the English Channel to the UK, where they will be put up in “taxpayer-funded hotels”.
Philp explains migrant route
He explained on the show as migrants walked rapidly behind him, attempting to shield their faces from the cameras: “Basically, they shadow them. The French vessel, when the migrant boat embarks, often the French know about it because they’ve got officers on the beach where the embarkation takes place. But if they haven’t, they rapidly spot it at sea, and then the French vessel escorts the migrant dinghy to the median line, to the sea border, where Border Force picks it up and provides a taxi service into Dover, and the migrants then get taken to a hotel.”
He added: “So if the boat which these migrants are heading to is successful later on today – I hope it isn’t, I’ll certainly be communicating their position to the gendarmerie – but if it is successful, within 24 hours the people around me could be in a taxpayer-funded hotel. “Which of course is precisely why they’re leaving France in the first place, because no such accommodation is provided by the French government!”
Viewers react furiously
Viewers were left fuming over the segment as one posted on X: "All carefully arranged and funded by the British taxpayer. They really are a gullible bunch." Someone else echoed: "It’s no longer simple incompetence on the part of the government, it is now literally criminal."
Warning shots incident
On Jeremy Kyle’s TalkTV show, Philp was asked about French authorities firing “warning” shots near him yesterday (July 28) as he filmed interviews on a boat. Kyle asked him: “Gunshots – do you believe they were aimed at you because you were doing an interview?” Philp replied: “Well, the French officers could clearly see we were conducting an interview on the back of the fishing boat. They sailed extremely close to us and started firing gunshots – 11 live rounds, we could see the bullets hitting the water behind our boat. “They weren’t firing before their approach, they weren’t firing afterwards. There was no notification of any sort of training exercise, so it did seem to me an effort to intimidate us.” However, the French authorities have now insisted it was a routine Navy training exercise carried out by officers who had no idea Philp was present or about his identity.
