Thoughts on the Latest Griffin Controversy

BNP leader Nick Griffin has become embroiled in controversy once more after stating that boats bringing illegal immigrants from Africa should be sunk. Well - that's how The Guardian headlined it - here's the full exchange:

Boats carrying illegal migrants to Europe should be sunk Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National party, said yesterday.

In a provocative intervention, Griffin, elected to the European parliament last month, called on the EU to introduce "very tough" measures to prevent illegal migrants entering Europe from Africa.

"If there's measures to set up some kind of force or to help, say the Italians, set up a force which actually blocks the Mediterranean then we'd support that," Griffin told BBC Parliament's The Record Europe.

"But the only measure, sooner or later, which is going to stop immigration and stop large numbers of sub-Saharan Africans dying on the way to get over here is to get very tough with those coming over. Frankly, they need to sink several of those boats. Anyone coming up with measures like that, we'll support, but anything which is there as a 'oh, we need to do something about it' but in the end doing something about it means bringing them into Europe we will oppose."

Shirin Wheeler, the programme's presenter, interrupted him to say the EU did not murder people. "I didn't say anyone should be murdered at sea – I say boats should be sunk, they can throw them a life raft and they can go back to Libya," Griffin said. "But Europe has, sooner or later, to close its borders or it's simply going to be swamped by the third world."

Griffin's comments were especially controversial because many thousands of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa attempt to make the crossing to Europe on rickety boats during the summer. Many land on Lampedusa, the Italian island less than 100 miles from Tunisia. The BBC said 37,000 migrants landed on Italian shores last year, a 75% increase on the year before.

In many respects I think he has a valid point - once several of the boats had been sunk and the people traffickers realised we meant business, presumably they would have to re-think their position or their routes.

Despite the hysterical reaction of the presenter, this does not constitute murder or necessarily have to result in anyone dying.

Even if some did die, presumably in the long run less people would die - on long marches organised by unscrupulous gang masters across the Sahara, gunned down at North African border posts, drowned at sea - and a lot less native Europeans would die from immigrant crime waves or be displaced from their native cities.

It's easy to pretend that morality simply means giving the migrants whatever they want; but does it?

The waves of migration from the Third World to the West go beyond mere 'immigration' - they are an invasion, a demographic conquest which will change our countries and our way of life altogether if left unchecked.

Are Griffin's remarks 'particularly controversial' in summer when many migrants are crossing, or is the fact that Lampedusa has a stable population of just over 6,000 people, but must somehow accommodate the arrival of over 37,000 migrants from completely alien and unassimilable cultures and backgrounds the real controversy here?

Such demographic change is unprecedented in history - aside from in terms of conquest.

The sad thing is that it takes a Griffin interview to draw attention to the invasion of Europe - the fact that so many arrive illegally should really be the big news. His comments may be hard line, but sensible minds should have been turned to solving this problem long ago - the favoured method for me being simply towing the migrants back (which Italy is now doing, albeit about 25 years too late).

Griffin hits the mark in that the only way to stop this invasion is to stop the arrival of the illegals on our territory in the first place. Once they are here, they are here to stay.

It was reported in January that around 90% of failed asylum seekers stay in the United Kingdom after being rejected and having no right to remain. Many simply disappear into the black economy or appeal to the point where they've been here so long they have to all intents and purposes settled:

As many as nine out of ten failed asylum seekers are being allowed to stay in Britain despite having no right to remain, a report from a Government watchdog reveals today.

The backlog of illegal immigrants awaiting deportation is growing fast as the UK Border Agency fails to keep pace with the number of rejected applicants. The number of unprocessed cases is also growing.

And Government rules stating that all successful asylum seekers must have their cases reviewed after five years - to see if their country is now safe enough to return to - have descended into farce, because the Border Agency has no way of tracking those living in Britain and no plans for a review.

Today's report acknowledges that the £800million-a-year system is now 'better organised than before', but highlights grave problems which in many cases are getting worse.

A surge in the number of asylum claims saw the backlog of undecided cases more than double in a year, to almost 9,000.

The NAO tracked more than 25,000 claims lodged from January 2007 to February 2008, of which almost 14,000 were refused.

But of 10,719 cases processed in the seven regions around the UK, only 918 - less than 10 per cent - had actually been deported by the following August.

The rate was higher for 3,000 false claimants who were fast-tracked in detention. Including these claims, the overall removal rate was just one in four.

A severe shortage of detention spaces is making removals harder, the report warned, with much of the available capacity taken up by foreign criminals who have completed their sentences and are awaiting deportation.

The NAO also highlighted glaring inefficiencies, including:

• Seventy per cent of planned deportations - where security staff accompany deportees on flights home - are cancelled, often due to lack of proper coordination, leading to 'additional work and costs'.

• The Agency often has to buy emergency travel documents from foreign governments to deport failed asylum seekers, but 13,000 of these have been wasted because individuals absconded, or because the papers expired.

• Since 2005, Britain has granted asylum for five years only - after which cases should be reviewed in the hope that some immigrants will be able to return home.

But astonishingly the Border Agency 'has no process' to track refugees living in Britain and 'no plans in place to review these cases'.

There are 8,000 due for review next year.

It seems that stopping the flow at its source is perhaps the only solution. The asylum system in Britain is now in such utter disarray that many cases are simply being abandoned due to the backlog, as The Telegraph reported yesterday:

At least 144,000 asylum seekers will be allowed to stay in Britain due to a backlog of claims.

More than 63,000 of the 450,000 historic cases that were found to have slipped under the radar for years have now been told they can stay.

Many are because they have been in the country for so long hat the Home Office would have difficulty trying to remove them on human rights grounds because they have effectively settled here.

Officials working through the so-called legacy backlog have so far examined 197,500 cases and there has been a 32 per cent approval rate, Lin Homer, the chief executive of the UK Border Agency, told MPs yesterday.

If that continues then some 144,000 will be able to stay once all the cases files have been looked at, in what the Tories have labelled an amnesty by the back door.

Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister, said: "Any progress is painfully slow on this."

The 450,000 files in the Case Resolution Programme were unearthed in 2006 after the foreign prisoners scandal.

Among them are claimants who should have been deported as far back as the mid-1990s.

The list includes 5,150 from Zimbabwe, 4,900 from Pakistan and 4,500 from Somalia.

Miss Homer revealed that at least 7,000 so far may never be traced and their files have been archived.

The problems are similar in many Western countries, with the number of people claiming asylum after illegal entry soaring.

We don't have the space or the resources for this to go on forever - so at the very least we can be grateful to Nick Griffin for actually airing the subject in the first place.