The Liberal Democrats annual conference has heard calls for small boats crossing the Channel to be referred to as “Brexit boats.”
The suggestion came after party leader Sir Ed Davey said Nigel Farage should apologise to Brits for letting the nation lose its right to return migrants to Europe with Brexit.
Davey explained that by leaving the EU, Britain also exited the Dublin Protocol. Under the protocol, anyone who arrived by irregular means could be returned to the last EU country through which they came from.
At a panel event at the Lib Dem conference, it was suggested that because of this, small boats should be referred to as “Brexit boats,” the Mirror reports.
A delegate from the Mole Valley Liberal Democrats group said: “Ed Davey recently said if we were still in the EU, we could simply send the people who arrive on boats, on the boats back.
“Can we use the term Brexit boat to refer to these boats? We need a soundbite, and Brexit boats, we should really do this.”
In response, former Welsh Liberal Democrats leader Lord Mike German said: “I love ‘the Brexit boats’ which of course is about the Dublin agreement, which of course we were extinguished from when we left the European Union.”
Speaking to the BBC earlier this month, Davey said Farage and the Tories “should be apologising” to anti-migrant protestors for ‘causing’ the huge increase in small boat crossings with Brexit.
“Before Brexit, we had a returns agreement with every European country,” he said.
“We were able to return people by law. They couldn’t stop us. And it acted as a real deterrent effect. The Conservatives and Nigel Farage need to answer for why they destroyed those return agreements that we had and why they have caused this problem in the first place.”