France hits out at UK for ‘not taking its share of asylum seekers’

French officials have accused Britain of “not taking its share” of asylum seekers as tensions over Channel crossings heat up.

Interior minister Gerald Darmanin said prime minister Jean Castex will write to Boris Johnson to offer a deal on aspects such as legal routes to Britain and the transfer of unaccompanied children.

But he added that France will not accept UK patrols or pushing small boats out of British waters.

“Can you imagine French police officers on British beaches? We are not the subcontractors of the British government,” he said.

‘Public insults’ towards the French

Darmanin criticised UK politicians’ “public” insults towards French and other European leaders.

It comes as prime minister Boris Johnson published a letter to French president Emmanuel Macron on Twitter last week, before sending it off, asking for an agreement on “all illegal migrants to cross the Channel to be returned”.

The gesture prompted EU ministers to withdraw an invitation to Home Secretary Priti Patel to discuss migration.

Darmanin said: “From the moment there is no more doublespeak and we can hold serious discussions, and our private exchanges correspond to our public exchanges, the French government is ready to very quickly resume discussions with Britain.

“We cannot change our geography, so we need to come to an understanding with our British friends and allies even though they have chosen to leave Europe.

UK ‘should work together with the EU’

“The common interest of Europe and the UK is to work together to try to solve this problem.”

He added: “What we want is a well-balanced agreement between the UK and the EU, which would address all the problems. An agreement that would open up legal ways of migrating to Britain.

“We note that there are 30,000 asylum applications in the UK, in France there are 150,000. The UK is not taking its share.”

Fernand Gontier, director of the French border police, said the small boats and engines used to transport migrants are made in China and brought to France through Germany by international criminal organisations.

Earlier this month, Priti Patel said people who are trying to enter the EU are a “mass migration crisis” and blamed it on the EU.

Priti Patel blames ‘migration crisis’ on EU

The Home Secretary said France is “overwhelmed” with migrants wanting to come to the UK as a result of the Schengen Agreement, which scrapped borders between the bloc’s countries.

She suggested the European Union’s free movement policy is to blame for “illegal immigration flows”.

Her comments came as 24,500 migrants crossed the English Channel in small boats this year, almost three times the numbers from last year.

But pressed to say whether the £54m she promised to France is enough to tackle the crisis as over 12,000 crossed the Channel since July, she said “it’s not about value for money, there is a mass migration crisis”.

Andra Maciuca

Andra is a multilingual, award-winning NQJ senior journalist and the UK’s first Romanian representing co-nationals in Britain and reporting on EU citizens for national news. She is interested in UK, EU and Eastern European affairs, EU citizens in the UK, British citizens in the EU, environmental reporting, ethical consumerism and corporate social responsibility. She has contributed articles to VICE, Ethical Consumer and The New European and likes writing poetry, singing, songwriting and playing instruments. She studied Journalism at the University of Sheffield and has a Masters in International Business and Management from the University of Manchester. Follow her on: